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INSPIRED 
MILLIONAIRES 

BY 

GERALD STANLEY LEE 

Editor of " Mount Tom" and Author of 

"The Lost Art of Reading," 

"The Voice of the 

Machines," ETC. 



I 



MOUNT TOM PRESS 
Northhampton, Massachusetts >-, 






w^ 






LIBRARY of congress! 
i wo Copies Heceiy«t.i 

MAY 25 1908 
2^ Sp^? 



Copyright, 1908 

BT 

The Mount Tom Pbess 



INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES 

PART ONE 

(Which Says They are Coming) 

I Millionaires and Other People T 

II Millionaires and Machines 23 

III The Library Cure 26 

IV Expectations 35 

V Three Men to Expect 46 

VI Millionaire's Turn First, Please 50 

PART TWO 

( Which Considers Ways and Means) 

I An Arrangement for Being Allowed to Think 61 

II Superintendents and Ideas 69 

III Unions and Ideas 79 

IV The Skilled Labor of the Poor 98 

V The Skilled Labor of the Rich 106 

PART THREE 

(Which is Concerned With Signs and Tokens) 

I The Lack of Conveniences for Millionaires . . 113 
II The Millionaire Who Does Not Want to Be 

Lonely 141 

III The MiUionaire Who Wants to Be Happy . . 146 

IV The Millionaire Who is as Good as Anybody . 152 
,,^^ V A Million Dollars as a Profession 163 

VI A Million Dollars as an Art Form: 

(1) Surplus and Aristocracy 170 

(2) The MiUionaire and His Imagination . 174 

(3) Imagination and the Higher Selfishness 187 

(4) Imagination and Monopoly 195 

(5) The Back-fire of Socialism 202 

(6) More Imagination and More Monopoly 207 

(7) Millionaires Who Invent People . . . 216 
VII How Some Money Looks 228 

VIII How the People Show Through 238 

IX The Still Revolution 252 

X Mr. Carnegie as an Experiment Station for 

Millionaires 256 

XI On Being Too Big to Do Wrong ..... 263 

XII The Next Corner of the World 276 

Epilogue 301 

3 



TO JENNETTE LEE 

I built a temple for my spirit's home ; 

I filled it with myself — and it was fair. 
From its dream-pavement to its dream-reared dome 

No spirit but my own existed there. 
About the walls I wrought with doting care 

Huge fancies alien to the world of men, 
Vague daubs and vast of youth and light and air 

Sublimely isolated in my spirit's den, 
I lived and toiled and dreamed and hoped — 

And then — and then — 



/ 

FIRE 

And Elijah said unto the people : Call ye on the 
name of your gods, and I mil call on the name of the 
Eord; and the God that answereth hy fire, let him be 
God.^ And all the people answered and said, It is 
well spoken. ' ' ' 



Millionaires and Other People 

It seems to be natural for all of us to 
be a little restless about our millionaires. 
They are all amateurs, or nearly all of 
them. The very idea of millionaires — 
mobs of them at least — is new in the 
world. They do not know how to do it. 

There are probably very few of us who 
can keep, very long at a time, from trying 
to think things out for them a Httle. The 
last time I had of this sort I wrote out 
the following: 

Rules for Millionaires 

First. Be a monopolist. 

Second. Get your monopoly without 
being mean, that is, by invention, by some 
sheer overwhelming service to mankind, 
by saving every man on the planet several 
dollars a year. 



Inspired Third. Take it for granted that if you 

MiUionaires ^^^ ^^^ ^ ^j^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^^ pOUnds of 

the planet and talk to every man on it 
beforehand, and ask him if he would be 
willing, in case you saved him several dol- 
lars a year, to go halves with you on what 
you saved for him — take it for granted 
that he would say yes. 

Fourth. Pocket the money. See to it 
that you are able to keep in absolute un- 
questioned control throughout the world 
of the thing you have thought of for it. 
In other words see to it that you have an 
opportunity to be mean if you want to. 

Fifth. Almost anyone could be mean. 
There have been many great inventions 
among men before, but no invention any- 
one could make would be so great to us 
now, or so original, that not being mean 
with it would not seem more great and 
more original. The first man with an in- 
vention in the twentieth century who will 
be professional with it — act like a gentle- 
man or an artist, with it, who will dedicate 

8 



it to humanity and himself together, who Millionaires 
will keep absolute control of his invention q^jj^^. p^^^i^ 
in order to make it creative and emanci- 
pating at every point where it touches 
human life, who will scatter the oppor- 
tunity and freedom of the new invention 
into the daily lives of the men who are 
making it in the factory, and the daily 
lives of the men who are selling it in the 
streets — in other words, the first man who 
will civilize an entire new industry, who 
will present this barbaric world with one 
industry that has been civilized in spite of 
it, and that keeps on being civilized in 
spite of it, and with no one to say it nay, 
will be the greatest, and most impressive, 
and most memorable figure in mod- 
ern times. Incidentally, he will ac- 
complish one other purpose. He will 
make having a great fortune one of the 
ideals instead of one of the diseases of 
the world. He will make being a million- 
aire more religious than being in a mon- 
astery, or than any of the other rather 



Inspired religious-looking, but comparatively easy 
Millionaires ^^^^^ j.j^^ ^^j^^ ^ g^ Francis of Assisi. 

But the main point will be that he will 
have done something practical and spirit- 
ually business-like with our whole modern 
manufacturing world. He will have sug- 
gested, and carried out, and settled the 
one way in which the industries of the 
world can be civilized, viz, one new im- 
perious invention at a time, controling one 
new original world-wide industry, which 
says how it shall be run itself, which shall 
be free and splendid, protecting the lives 
that have been yielded up to it, and that 
belong to it, establishing factories that shall 
be literally, and every day, engaged in the 
act of pouring out from their doors upon 
the life of the world, new men and new 
things. When one looks up to the fac- 
tory windows one shall think of them to- 
gether there, the men and the things, 
making and being made together, each 
after their kind. 

But it is not merely because he will be 



the redeemer of industry that I am look- Millionaires 
ing forward to this man. I am looking o°her People 
forward to him because I believe in 
rich men and I cannot longer bear to see 
our rich men humiliated before the world. 
The man who does this first, who uses the 
wealth that has come to him from his cre- 
ative spirit, to liberate the same creative 
spirit in others will be looked back upon, 
I believe, as the Redeemer of Wealth. 
A rich young man some two thousand 
years ago in one of the smaller Roman 
provinces was told to sell all his goods and 
feed the poor, not because he had wealth 
but because he did not seem to have any 
creative spirit himself to put with wealth, 
and he did not know how to use wealth to 
liberate the creative spirit in others. He 
was told to sell all his goods and feed the 
poor, because it was obvious that any 
better, or less shiftless, or easy-going 
course, would have been beyond him. He 
had no great ideals to express with great 
riches, or great beliefs, or energies, or 



Inspired vision of Opportunities. Like a great 

Millionaires ,■, • ■• 111 

many other men, rich or poor, he had a 
poor helpless neuter soul. He did not 
know anything in particular he wanted to 
do, and went about asking people. A 
millionaire at his wits' end ought not to 
have any money, and he was told so. 
Even the general advice of Jesus (which 
is always quoted as against rich men) 
was against the rich men that he and 
the people about him knew. Because he 
gave up entirely, apparently, on a few 
crude, provincial-minded millionaires in a 
little side-country of the world, before a 
single church had been founded, it does 
not follow that he would give up entirely 
on millionaires now, after two thousand 
years of Christianity has had a chance at 
them. 

It would not be hard to prove that the 
very faults of the great world-gathered, 
world-wide millionaires we are producing 
to-day, have qualities of insight and 
consideration, and responsibility, that 



would almost do to have made a whole re- Millionaires 
ligion out of, for one of those old- fash- o°her People 
ioned, hemmed-in, narrow millionaires 
that were being produced by the simple 
industrial system (with hardly a machine 
in it) that obtained in the time of Christ in 
Palestine. 

It may possibly be true that million- 
aires have been less improved by Chris- 
tianity in two thousand years than any 
other class, but it must have done some- 
thing with the rich. Even the Christian- 
ity-in-solution in the world would have 
done something in two thousand years. 
It probably took a meaner man to be rich 
then than it does now. 

A man was rich on purpose in those 
days and for its own sake, and as things 
are to-day, what with the discovery of 
new countries, and continents, and the 
discoveries of chemistry and geology, and 
the boundless inventions of machinery, 
the millionaires we have now are million- 
aires that could not have been helped. 
13 



Inspired They are a new kind of man — many of 

Millionaires ^^^^ j^ j^ ^^^^^ ^^ -f. ^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ 

human nature had been produced — 
rolled up upon us by the sheer develop- 
ment, and fruitfulness, and heating up, 
and pouring over, and expansion of the 
earth. Great elemental forces silently 
working out the destiny of man, have 
seized these men, touched their eyes with 
vision. They are rich by revelations, by 
habits of great seeing and of great daring. 
They are idealists. They have really 
used their souls in getting their success, 
their mastery over matter, and it is by 
discovering other men's souls, and pick- 
ing out the men who had them, and gath- 
ering them around them, that the suc- 
cess has been kept. Many of them are 
rich by some mighty, silent, sudden serv- 
ice they have done to a whole planet at 
once. They have not had time to lose 
their souls. There is a sense in which 
they might be called The Innocents of 
Riches — some of them. 



At all events, I cannot help believing Millionaires 
we have come to the point at last, where, q^^^^ people 
with two thousand years of The New 
Testament struggling up through the 
himian spirit it is time for men to begin to 
beheve that a man may be good enough to 
be rich. Times have changed. It is com- 
ing to pass, even before our eyes. 
The very children can look up and 
see that times have changed. We are 
going to have more rich men in the world, 
not less. What with the introduction of 
machines and of sudden inventions, mil- 
lionaires cannot be helped. We might as 
well make the most of it. For every new 
value thrust upon the world, some new 
man is going to be obHged to be rich 
whether he knows how or not. There is no 
telling which of us shall be chosen next — 
if we keep thinking of things. And 
every man must be ready. The world 
must be full of visions. It must weld 
itself great faiths for the rich. I drink 
daily at this belief. I beheve that the 

IS 



Inspired ncxt Mcssiah that comes to the world is 
going to be a Messiah for Millionaires. 
I believe the time is almost at hand when 
he will come to us. He will come rather 
modestly, perhaps, and he will be a silent, 
busy man, but when he dies and every- 
body turns his way, and looks a minute, 
there will be a great village somewhere 
smoking up to the sky blessing him. And 
slowly when they look at him everybody 
will know, and slowly everybody will be- 
gin to beheve, that being a rich man is one 
of the greatest and most honorable of all 
the professions, they will see that a man 
can be rich and be a gentleman with his 
money — a gentleman down to his last 
dollar — that he can even be a great artist 
with it. The greatest of them — those 
who have the deepest insight with money 
will be poets. Their money will go sing- 
ing from them out through the open doors 
of other men's Kves. Everyone will see 
then that holding on to a million dollars 
and doing things with it is more religious 

i6 



than giving it all up with one wave of Miuionaires 
one's hand, and merely being self-sacrific- ^ , p , 
ing with it. Being a millionaire will con- 
tinue to make a man have a rather worldly 
look, perhaps, but if a man believes big 
things with a million dollars and expects 
them of himself and of other people, he 
will seem to us in the twentieth century a 
religious man, and he will seem a great 
deal more religious to us, than that nobly- 
blinded, glorious old hero we all think of 
first, over in Yasnaya Polynaya, who is 
sitting out the remainder of his days in 
a hair shirt and blouse, and who looks so 
religious to us now, and who is so literal 
and faithful, and so like the New Testa- 
ment (2,000 years ago) , but who does not 
believe big things of men the way the 
'New Testament does, and who does not 
believe in men at all unless they are very 
poor, and who does not see any hope for 
any of us, either in our religion or our 
art, or our lives, but to level us down into 
Russian peasants, and begin over. But 
17 



Inspired it is hard to believe it is ever going to sat- 
MUhonaires .^^y. people as a faith or a religion, to ac- 
cept Tolstoi's vision for the world, wipe 
away four thousand years with a sweep 
— temples, orchestras, libraries, Michel 
Angelo, Copernicus, Shakespeare, steam- 
ships, and wireless telegraph, and begin 
the world all over again, stupidly, and 
from the bottom up — with a sediment 
of Russian peasants. 

Tolstoi is going to continue to be 
respected as a genuine and noble character, 
and he is always going to be remembered, 
no doubt, as a morally picturesque man, 
a sort of Laocoon, but he is not going to 
seem to people fifty or sixty years from 
now, particularly religious, or in the spirit 
of the New Testament. The incredible 
thing about the New Testament, taken as 
a whole, is the way that Jesus had of ap- 
proaching men — the rich and the poor 
alike — and making them believe in them- 
selves and see visions for their own lives. 
The one thing of all others that Christ 

i8 



did with people was to make them believe Muiionaires 
in themselves and in one another more than ^j^^^ peopie 
they wanted to. He set twelve men at 
work in three years to make a new world. 
He made them believe they could. And so 
they did. And if this same Christ were 
to come into that new world to-day, 
who is there who can really doubt that he 
would have faith and daring enough to con- 
ceive great ideals for it, and for the men 
who are rich in it, as well as for those who 
are poor? It is impossible not to believe 
that he would see several things that rich 
men could do, that if he were to meet a 
small man with a great fortune to-day, in- 
stead of scaling the man's fortune down 
until it was as small as the man he would 
level the man up to the fortune, to the vis- 
ion or ideal that belongs with a fortune. 
He would not advocate ( as we have taken 
it for granted he did in the New Testa- 
ment) throwing away the man and the for- 
tune both. If one is to make any inference 
at all from the general nature of his utter- 
19 



Inspired Eiices, and his attitude toward human 

Millionaires ^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^ ^hat he WOuld do with a 

millionaire now, one would be inclined to 
say that the first thing he would do, prob- 
ably, would be to distinguish him from 
the other millionaires. He would be 
human. He would not believe that the 
world was going to be saved (like the 
socialists) by dropping off over the edge 
of the planet one entire class of men in 
one indistinguishable mass. If a world 
is going to be saved at all it is going to be 
saved by the men who see things first. 
If some of these men who see things first 
turn out to be millionaires, we will need 
them so much that we will have to keep 
them whether they are rich or poor. 

These men who see things first — the 
invention, the man who can be original 
with his mind, who can think of some- 
thing that all the world will want, and can 
found a new industry with it, and the 
millionaire — the man who can be original 
with his money, who will buy the new in- 



dustry and be a monopolist with it, i. e., MiiUonaires 
will run it — not in a scared helpless way, ^^^^^ p^^ ,^ 
as his competitors like, but as he likes him- 
self, who will run it as he likes in behalf 
of the laborer, in behalf of the inventor, 
and in behalf of the public, and in his own 
behalf in such a way that everybody 
would see that it would be an international 
disaster for him to give it up — these two 
men: the inventor who sees things first, 
and the millionaire who sees things first 
have the making of a new industrial world 
between them. 

The new industrial world is coming to 
us one new free-born industry at a time. 

I would not be understood to mean by 
all this that I am placing my faith in in- 
spired millionaires as a class. But I do 
believe that the next great thing that is 
going to happen in the world is one in- 
spired millionaire. I believe that one will 
be enough. He will make the rest un- 
happy. They will watch him really hv- 
ing with his money, and doing big, inter- 



Inspired esting thuigs with it, and they will feel 

Millionaires 

bored. 

And it will not be by being righteous, 
and noble-looking that the inspired mil- 
lionaire will appeal to other miUionaires, 
but by having a good time. He is going 
to do these things because he likes them, 
quietly and all in the day's work and with- 
out being a model, and without any fine 
moralizing flourishes, in a plain every- 
day business man's way, as a matter of 
course. 

This is what he will be like, I think, 
when he comes. 

One will be enough. 



I 



II 

Millionaires and Machines 

T MIGHT not be amiss to state a 
particular situation and what, all 
things considered, an inspired millionaire 
would do in it. 

Not so very many years ago, when a 

certain well-known factory in was 

being run like many others nowadays, on 
the old-established principle of taking 
men's souls and minds away and giving 
them libraries, a man who was known as 
Long John about the factory, and who 
was one of the " A Machine " men, and 
who had more of a soul probably than any 
other man in the mill, was discharged by 
the Union and The Firm both for insubor- 
dination. The " A Machine " Union had 
two hundred and seventy men in it. 
Long John retaliated by saying (1) that 
in two years there wouldn't be any A 

»3 



Inspired Machine. (2) that there wouldn't be any 
1 lonaires ^ Machine Union. He had a machine, he 
said, that would take the place of two hun- 
dred and seventy men and forty-five more. 
The same machine, he intimated, would 
take the place of The Firm. " The Firm 

could go ." I regret to say that 

Long John said that the firm could go to 
the same place he said The Union was 
going. 

The result was, it all happened or nearly 
happened as stated. The new machine 
was invented. The A Machine men were 
turned out all through the country, and 
there was nothing else they knew how to 
do. The Firm itself was only saved by 
buying up the machine from Long John 
at revenge prices and finally by making 
him a junior member. 

The first thing that the inspired million- 
aire is going to believe in, with his money, 
is Long Johns. He is going to believe 
that the only way to keep ahead in modern 
manufacturing, that is, in manufacturing 

24 



with machines, is to place inventive and Miuionaires 
interested men in charge of the machines. Machines 
Other things being equal he is going to 
believe that if his factory has the most 
creative men in it, the most of them at the 
most points, it will have the most chance 
of keeping at the head of the race. He 
is going to make his decisions and invest- 
ments, and promotions, and appoint his 
superintendents, on the principle that 
competition in manufacture is a race of 
machines. The less he allows his men to 
be like the machines they work with, the 
more they are going to do with the ma- 
chines he already has, and the more and 
better machines he is going to have with 
which to hold the market. 



»s 



Ill 

The Library Cure 

I WAS talking on this general subject 
the other day with a friendly millionaire 
who happens to be the chief owner of a 
large mill which is not a thousand miles 
from Mount Tom and which we will call, 
for the sake of convenience, the Holbrook 
Mill. I had been trying to express a little 
my ideas about machines and about letting 
men think in factories and had just been 
telling him about the career of Long John 
— and I had told who Long John 
was. " But the trouble is," he said, " you 
cannot get Long Johns." He then went 
on to say that according to his experience, 
" machinery was machinery and that was 
all there was to it." " The men who work 
with machines do not think after a year or 
so," he said, " and would rather not." 
He rather patronized my hopefulness, I 



z6 



thought. I listened a few minutes more, The Library 
while he heaped up difficulties, and then 
I stepped in with what must have looked 
to him, as a practical man, a sort of trip- 
ping literary promptness. I said that it 
seemed to me there would be no way out 
for our machine-civihzation until the 
owners of machines had ideals for their 
employees, as well as for the machines, 
and made it a point to improve the men 
and the machines together. 

He sniffed a little when I spoke of 
ideals for employees. " The Holbrook 
Silk Mill has them," he said. 

Then I remembered I had seen the Hol- 
brook Silk Mill once, out in the suburbs, 
its little Model Village all around it. I 
remembered a long day I had spent there 
tramping about with a reporter from 
New York. It was true, in a way, that 
the Firm was always appearing to have 
ideals — at all events it always appears 
to be trying experiments in the mill and 
the mill village. It gives dances and re- 
27 



Inspired vivals to the employees, and such things, 
1 lonaires ^^^ .^ ^^^ ^ beautif ul little library in the 

center of the works, green grass growing 
all around, ivy at the windows and moss on 
the books. 

The point that Mr. immediately 

took up and emphasized was the moss on 
the books. 

I said I thought that books were the 
foolish end of the ideal to begin with. 
They were the foolish end with anybody, 
to say nothing of factory hands. And 
then, as I was trying to be especially rea- 
sonable with a practical man and talk facts 
and not theories, I brought up the E. S. 
Manufacturing Company, which has a 
huge plant in one of those wide flat towns 
one sees f roni the car windows in the mid- 
dle West. The mill has, no one knows 
how many acres of floors, seven big chim- 
neys, and a small library — books in same 
condition as above, but it goes one step 
further than the Holbrook Silk Mill. The 
Firm takes the ground that the most 
28 



natural way to rouse men's minds to The Library 
other men's works — books in libraries for ^^ 
instance — is through their own works, 
the works they are daily engaged in them- 
selves. So the Firm publishes its own 
magazine, oiFers prizes twelve times a 
year, for the best idea of the month that 
any employee may have, for carrying on 
the business or any part of the business. 

" Sounds well," said Mr. . " But as 

regards actual ideas for the works and as 
regards the actual use of books in the 
library, do you know the results? " 

I was not sure. 

" I know," he said, " I have looked it 
up." 

1. No ideas for the works. 

2. Moss on the books. 

I thought I would not bring forward 
any more practical illustrations after this. 
So I merely talked on in a muffled, hope- 
ful way on the general principle. Finally 
I said that the failure of a magazine 
did not prove much. It did not prove that 
29 



Inspired Hien's minds were not interested in the 
1 lonaires ^^^.^ ^^ Other men through the work they 
are interested in themselves. It merely- 
proved that they were not interested in 
the work they were doing themselves. 
Why should they be? If our modern 
machinery keeps a man standing before 
a lever all his days, if he is not allowed to 
do anything with his mind but put his 
hand from left to right with it for fifteen 
or twenty years, why should his mind be 
interested in anything whatever — least 
of all, why should it be interested in 
his work? Why should it be interested in 
itself? If a man cannot use his mind, 
the most intelligent thing he can do with 
it is to drop it. He becomes a motor for 
running a hand from left to right. If 
improved machinery required him to run 
his hand from right to left, he would be 
thrown out of employment. To have 
tried the Library Cure on men, in condi- 
tions like these we are confronting now, 
and to have found that it failed, does not 
30 



prove that ideals for employees are not The Library 
practicable. It merely proves that the ^^^ 
man with a mere modern left-to-right or 
right-to-left factory mind can no more 
be interested in a library than a Cog 
Wheel. Even the Firm Magazine does 
not interest him. Being interested — 
such a man is not long in learning — is 
out of date. The sooner he gets over any 
latent idea of being interested, if he has 
to work with a machine, the better. The 
more he and his machine are alike the more 
happily they get on together. 

This is what the Man with the Machine, 
judged by his actions at least, thinks that 
he thinks — namely, that he does not 
need to think. And this is what his em- 
ployer thinks apparently. " Machines 
are machines," he says, crossing his legs 
before his three-thousand-dollar fireplace, 
" and that is all there is to it." 

In the meantime the moss on the books, 
the saloon, the more stupid strike (from 
this man who does not think) , the bribery 

3» 



Inspired qucstion, the tenement question, the cock 
1 lonaires ggj^^^ |.jjg political boss, the walking dele- 
gate, and the other things, ad infinitum. 

All that society can do with the Library 
Cure is to open the wound. The thing 
that a man does his knowing with and his 
real reading with, is his life. The only 
thorough way to act on his reading is to 
act on his life. And the only thorough 
way to act on his life, is to act on the 
center and core of it, on eight hours a day 
of it — the habit of mind in which he does 
his daily work. A man knows as much 
generally as his habit of mind in his daily 
work will let him know. 

When factory work is so arranged that 
the only habit of mind a man can have 
in a factory is the habit of not having any 
mind, the question a machine civilization 
is obliged to face, is. What can be done for 
a man that is in the habit of not having 
any mind? What can be done for mil- 
lions of such men with whom we are obliged 
to live, and vote, and worship, which 

3* 



shall be consistent and thorough? A The Library 
great factory which takes a man's soul 
away from him, and then presents him 
with a library is not thorough. Neither 
is it consistent. It should take away the 
library. All that a library can do for 
such a man is to remind him of the rest 
of him which has been taken away. 

But can a great factory help taking a 
man's soul away? Factories must do 
their work with machinery. Machinery 
is not going to be uninvented, or moved 
off the world, and machinery makes men 
like itself. Machinery involves minute 
subdivisions of labor. Subdivision of 
labor means subdivision of the laborer. 
Can it be said with truth of our present 
civilization, that Mr. Andrew Carnegie, 
who (like the rest of us) has been taking 
men's souls away, and giving them paper 
books instead, is doing as well as any man 
can be expected to do, who does anything 
at all in an age of machines? 

Thus we are brought face to face with 

33 



Inspired the full breadth of the entire question of 
1 lonaires j^Q^j^pj^ civiHzation with which we all 

must reckon sooner or later. It is a ma- 
chine-civilization. Can men who live in a 
machine-civihzation, a civilization in which 
men are obliged to earn their money with 
machines, in which they cannot even spend 
it without machines — have souls? 



34 



IV 

Expectations 

IN TRYING to answer the question, 
" Can men who work with machines 
have souls ? " it is only fair to say that 
this is not a work on political economy or 
industrial science, and that it has been 
written on the assumption that the ques- 
tion of human labor is one that belongs to 
the arts and the humanities and not merely 
to the sciences. 

Perhaps nothing — not even a clod of 
earth — belongs merely to the sciences. 

Our present grave industrial problem, 
the problem of how men who work with ma- 
chines can have souls, and of how we can 
get the men who own the machines to let 
them, while it has its scientific aspects, is 
more, after all, a problem of human char- 
acter, a study of human motives, and of 
the powers of men, of psychology, intu- 

35 



Inspired ition, consciciice, of worship, and of 
what in the long run men really want in 
this world, and are going to get, and of 
what really makes men happy. Indus- 
trial science does not claim to be expert in 
divining human nature, and is preoccu- 
pied with the laws and principles them- 
selves more than with what the men — just 
around the next corner of the world, are 
going to choose to do with them. 

Such a book as I have in mind, a world- 
divining book, might be written by a man 
who has more the equipment of the novel- 
ist than the scientist — a novelist who 
does not write novels but who is wise and 
true about people, or perhaps it will 
be written when it comes by some big play- 
wright in the human spirit like Shake- 
speare who reaches under desire, and who 
sees and controls the motive energies of 
men. 

It is in the spirit and the hope that a book 
like this is going to be written sometime, 
that this one has been written toward it. 
36 



The scientific men of to-day, as I under- Expectations 
stand them, are not averse to letting in a 
work of human appeal, a work of art or of 
action in their own field, or even a work 
of the imagination, and if the imagi- 
nation in it, is true or in the right direction, 
they will be the first to welcome it. It is 
not literary for the literary men to crowd 
out the scientific man from his influence 
on the arts, and it is not scientific to crowd 
out literature and the method and appeal 
of literature from science. It is what 
literature really is or should be seeking 
to be to-day — a kind of glorified apphed 
science. Chemistry is not the physician. 
Biology is not the mother of society, and 
political economy is not the dynamo of 
business, and what this country needs next 
in the way of books on this subject is not 
more maps, charts, or systems, more net- 
work — vast trolleys of theories over our 
heads, but some central powerhouse 
of thought, of faith, and of turn- 
ing on the wills of men. Perhaps 

37 



Inspired it is bccEuse wc havc considered the 
Millionaires gj^Q^'^j^g th^t go with this subject and 

the ideas that go with it, apart, that we 
have been so helpless in dealing with it. 
Perhaps it is because our emotions have 
not been fertilized or allowed to have 
their pollen on them, that they have 
been planted merely in libraries and 
have never come up. Only some man 
with the double equipment for it, who 
works in the spirit of a Henry George, and 
writes from the point of view of a human 
being and a scientist at once, some 
man whose heart reasons and whose rea- 
son burns, can write the book at last that 
shall search the hearts of the people and 
turn the wheels of events. 

In the meantime the people, until their 
hearts have been searched and lighted and 
the power turned on, are on trial before the 
older and the weary nations, and before 
the kings and cynics of the earth. In the 
meantime we are living in a country where 
every class of men, where every industry, 
38 



is fighting against itself, where every vil- Expectations 
lage and nearly every factory is in a state 
of civil war, a country governed by the 
people and for the people, where the peo- 
ple are grinding up their souls in iron and 
in cogs and wheels (in machines called 
machines), where people are lying and 
stealing in machines (called trusts), and 
killing to get enough to eat, and where all 
men are asking " Can men who live with 
machines have souls ? " 

Perhaps it is just as well that every 
book on this subject should not be purely 
scientific. Perhaps there is nothing sup- 
erficial or unworthy in strong feeling, or 
in hope or fear or despair, or in breaking 
through to the truth, or even in a httle 
singing, in discussing the fate of a great 
and proud people among the nations of 
the earth. 

And so, gentle reader, I have come to the 
conclusion, timidly, and after butting a 
rather fooHsh and experimental pair of 
brains against several high walls of 

39 



Inspired books on the subject, that in all 

Millionaires /» •• •' t j ii •! 

oi its practical and even the theo- 
retical and intellectual phases, the 
labor of a world is essentially a human 
or spiritual subject, that the knowledge 
of human nature, of the laws of the 
human spirit is the knowledge that has 
the most masterful bearing on it, that the 
great human insights, the eternal passions, 
the great faiths of the human soul, are 
the energies that are finally going to 
count in the great practical and industrial 
problem that is growing to-day out of the 
presence of the machine in modern life. 

And so I have claimed the question for 
my question and for every man's, and it 
is only by its being every man's question 
— a human question — that it can be 
settled. " Can men who work with ma- 
chines have souls? " 

The socialists seem to have an idea 

that somebody is going to think of 

something, some industrial contrivance 

or machine for morality, which will be set 

40 



up, and which will make it possible for Expectations 
men in a machine-age to have souls, if 
they want them. But I have come to be- 
lieve that it is not by any economic scheme, 
or social device, some way of inventing 
evil off the earth, but by great personal be- 
liefs, that the battle for the existence of 
the soul in an age of machines will have to 
be fought. If it is true that these great, 
splendid, blind machines are crowding me, 
and crowding my brother, and even 
crowding a God, from off the earth, there 
can be but one reason for it, and that is 
that my brother has been so busy in mak- 
ing bigger and bigger machines every 
year that he has forgotten to make big- 
ger men to go with them, and bigger be- 
liefs to make bigger men out of. What 
he is going to do next, is to build him great 
creeds to go with his great machines, and 
great men that shall be built out of his 
great creeds. 

The world as originally planned, was 
planned to have men in it, and any mod- 
41 



Inspired em contrivance that is being rigged up 

Millionaires ■, n j? ^•x.' ^ • j.t_ 

by professors of political economy m the 
first breathless minutes of the twentieth 
century, to make a world all of a sudden 
which is going to work as well whether 
there are men in it or not, or whether the 
men in it are trying to be men or not, will 
have to be complex. An industrial sys- 
tem which is based on nobody's expecting 
anything of anybody, or upon expect- 
ing as little as possible, has to be elaborate 
because it is not true. Lying is always 
elaborate and everything that goes with 
it. There is no denying the value of the 
economic expert. If we have chosen an 
economic system in which we are going 
to lie, the more specialists and libraries 
it is going to take to help us do it. 

In the meantime everybody really 
knows that in the last resort, if we are 
going to have a real economics — an 
economics that can save a real world — it 
will not be an economics that only a special- 
ist can understand. The truths that 

42 



strike down to the bottom of the matter Expectations 
are all hmnan and elemental. The actual 
situation, instead of being elaborate, is 
standing out at this moment, when one 
thinks of it, with a terrible, naive sim- 
plicity across the whole broad front of 
modern life. 

The whole industrial problem of our 
modern mechanical age is an essentially- 
religious problem, the problem of getting 
a few millionaires, or industrial leaders 
in this world to believe in the men. 
Modern industry is getting more com- 
plex, requires more and more an expert 
to mention the matter, because it is an in- 
dustry which is trying to get on more and 
more, without employers and without em- 
ployees who trust each other, and who can 
afford to. The center of an industrial 
situation is its organic belief or its organic 
disbelief in human nature. 

The first man, whether he is a man of 
thought, or a man of action, who shall do 
something or say something that shall 

43 



Inspired make people quite generally see that be- 
MiUionaires jjg^j^g jj^ human nature can be made to 

pay — will settle the situation. It is an 
act of insight, the fixing of the real or 
live belief of men of action, that is going 
to bring order out of chaos in our modern 
life. What shall we have for our work- 
ing belief, for instance with regard to 
capital? Shall we believe that nothing 
good can be expected of a man with a 
million dollars and kill our millionaires 
off? Or shall we believe that we are 
going to produce and are already pro- 
ducing men who will be good enough and 
who will know enough to have a million 
dollars? The moment men's creeds or 
gospels of action are determined, all the 
other aspects fall into line. What shall 
we believe with regard to labor? Shall 
we believe that the way out in the labor 
problem is for every man to have a be- 
lief in labor — a belief that doing five- 
dollar work pays whether one gets the 
five dollars or not? Or shall we believe 

44 



that the way out in the labor problem is Expectations 
not a belief in labor, but a belief in wages, 
— in not doing five-dollar work until one 
has the five dollars? 

It would be hard to mention a single 
point in our present industrial life, which 
is not being settled or cannot be settled 
by what men believe or fail to believe 
about themselves or about one another. 



45 



V 
Three Men to Expect 

THE best way to prophesy the 
course of the next few hun- 
dred years would be to pick out the 
three hardest men to beheve in, in 
this modern world — the three particular 
kinds of men this modern world has 
stopped expecting — and believe in them 
and expect them. I have no special theory 
or program, or device that I propose to 
hang out — flutter like a handkerchief in 
the face of the most appalling cataclysm 
of elemental forces that this world has ever 
seen, now gathering upon us; but I have 
three great beliefs which I beheve are 
being silently and irrevocably written to- 
day, in sleep and in waking, upon the 
hearts of the strong through all the earth. 
These three great faiths are three men. 
I have made these three men my creed. I 
46 



believe in the inspired millionaire, I be- Three Men 
lieve in the inspired laborer, and I believe ° ^^^ 
in the poet or world-singer, who shall con- 
ceive, and reveal, and inspire these men 
out of the men we know about us, who 
shall forge out the great faiths for them, 
the faiths that alone can glow through 
and melt down and build up a world. 

The man who has the situation most 
immediately in his hands — if he is going 
to do any believing — is the inspired 
millionaire. He has the advantage of 
position. More people notice him. The 
moment one exists, people will believe in 
him, and inspired and believing labor will 
gather about him. Instead of trying to 
run an industrial world on the cash-reg- 
ister, fare-recorder principle, in which 
men will not need to believe in themselves 
or in one another, he is going to start a 
fashion of making and invoking men — 
men in whom nobody can help believing. 
A few sample millionaires made out of a 
few great sample beliefs in human nature, 

47 



Inspired judiciously placed about in this modern 

Millionaires ■, -, it i 'j. • j? 

world, would make it over m a few min- 
utes — that is, for all practical purposes. 
They would make everybody believe that 
it was going to be made over, and make 
everybody see that it was belief that was 
going to do it, and the start would be 
made. 

This modern world in its great crisis, 
with its new machines, is at the parting 
of the ways. There are two courses we 
can take ; the course of arranging a world 
so that men will not be necessary, because 
they cannot be expected, and the course of 
arranging it so that they will have to be 
expected. Some of us believe that the 
more inconvenient it is made for a world 
not to have men in it, the better. We be- 
lieve that the way out for us modern men, 
struggling with these huge machines, is 
not to creep back from our souls into the 
machines, but to come out and face the 
machines and lift ourselves to the 
machines, loom up with our souls beside 
48 



them and be men with them. So we face Three Men 
the issue. It is the final challenge of *° ^^ 
Matter, live, terrible, steel-fingered, 
boiler-souled, to the manhood of the 
earth. 



49 



VI 

Millionaire's Turn Firsts Please 

WHEN the inspired millionaire 
comes to the conclusion that it 
pays to have men who can think, with his 
machines, and begins scouring the world 
for Long Johns and looking about 
under the machines for them, the first 
thing that happens is — as has already been 
intimated — that he cannot find them. 
He finds himself growing a little con- 
temptuous and tyrannical towards all 
these men who work with machines and 
would rather not think. He falls into a 
naive, disgusted surprise. Now, that (all 
in a moment) he has decided that all these 
men with his machines can think — wKy 
do they not begin to do it? Gradually, as 
he thinks more and more himself, his 
mood changes. He finds himself won- 
dering at the men a httle, — that they are 

5° 



not worse than they are. Then he begins Mimonaire's 
to wonder about himself and about his pj^^ *" ' 
class. Slowly there falls a kind of 
fumbling, wavering humbleness upon 
him. As he walks back and forth 
through his factory — this vision of faces 
clacking in and out among machines — 
why is it that they do not want to think? 
Why is it that he cannot get Long Johns? 
Will there be more Long Johns or fewer 
in twenty years, with whom his sons can 
carry on the business? 

Belonging to the millionaire class, and 
being a millionaire because he has time or 
power to think out the future and past 
in business more than others, the next 
experience he has, probably, is the sense 
that he has been personally abused, that 
the employers who have gone before him 
have left nothing but these herds of 
machines to run machines with. They 
have killed off the Long Johns. They 
have struck at the roots of the business. 
All he seems to see before him is a great 
51 



Inspired human gap, for thirty years, a whole gen- 
i honaires gj,^^-Qj^ ^^f j^^j^ ^jj^^ j^g^g been swept out of 

reach. Long Johns are not to be had. 
They were to be had once; and instead, 
there is this huge, hungry, unreasoning 
drove of mongrels, half -machines, half- 
men, staring one forever in the face. 

Then the inspired millionaire falls to 
thinking what it is, that all this time has 
been happening to the world. 

It comes to something like this. The 
rich man, who has always, from the first, 
possessed the ground and the holes under 
the ground (the two things from which 
leisure and thought can be dug) , and who 
has guarded for thousands of years the 
ground and the hole under the ground, so 
that no poor man could get at them ex- 
cept on terms the rich man dictated, — 
has now added, in the nineteenth century, 
a third means of subjection — the 
Machine. There was a time once when 
the poor man at least had his hands. 
Whatever happened to him, he felt that 

52 



he had at least his hands. But now he Miuionaire's 
has not even his hands. His hands are pj^^se "^ ' 
nothing without a machine and the 
machine costs money. If he wants to 
make the work of his hands worth any- 
thing he must ask the rich man to let him 
have a machine for it. 

Then, what happens next? The rich 
man having gained, as in the case of the 
ground and the guarded hole under the 
ground, a purely military advantage, at 
once proceeds to use it all for himself. 
The poor man takes the rich man's 
machine and stands by it, makes the 
machine into six hundred men. The rich 
man pays him (what he has always paid 
him) the wages of one man and pockets 
the wages of the other five hundred and 
ninety-nine. It looks like a plain case of 
military occupation, the man with the gun 
threatening the man with the fist. We 
have grown rather used to it. Some of 
us are so used to it that we think it is the 
nature of things. And yet if one were 

S3 



Inspired to account honcstly for a certain low tone. 
Millionaires ^ certain modern meanness which seems 
to have come into the business and indus- 
try of the world in these later years, it 
would not be too much to say that it is 
because the ideals and methods of busi- 
ness have slowly fallen into the hands of 
a man with a gun, who is capable of 
threatening a man with a fist. 

Under conditions that formerly ob- 
tained, a certain type of man was often 
encountered as a leader of industry. He 
made being a manufacturer almost an art, 
and he gave to commerce in many com- 
munities the dignity of the professions. 
When this type of man found gradually, 
as things were going, that leading in busi- 
ness, meant leading with a gun, he 
dropped his gun and went out of business. 
So things have grown worse and worse. 
A man with a gun always grows worse, 
and now there is a whole crowd of men 
with a gun keeping each other in counte- 
nance, egging each other on, and hiring 

54 



philosophers to make the gun look wise Millionaire's 
and like a law of nature, and artists to p"g™g *" ' 
make it look beautiful, and lawyers to 
make it look legal, and churches to make 
it look right — until it looks for all the 
world like God's Gun to most of us. And 
so things have gone with the world. We 
begin to spell out the new century, a great 
wonder and pain upon us — some of us. 
What is it we see as we look forth? Soci- 
ety moved to its foundations, our whole 
modern life, slowly, mightily, across the 
world, and with a great sigh of a hundred 
years lifts up from this nineteenth cen- 
tury at last, rousing itself. With our 
own eyes we are seeing it. It is making 
itself ready for the longest reckoning, 
the greatest battle in history. The field 
is already white with the tents. They are 
going out to meet each other unless some- 
thing can be done about it — on the one 
side Capital, God with a Gun, going out 
to meet Man — Man with a Fist — a 
terrible light in his eyes. This is what the 

55 



Inspired inspired millionaire sees, as he looks ahead. 
Millionaires j^ ^^^^^ j^^ ^^^^^ jjc finds it Very 

hard as he thinks — even with the gun 
in his hands and his fingers playing with 
the trigger — not to think against him- 
self. In action it may be easy to side 
with a gun, but in thinking, a gun does not 
help. One gets a little ashamed of think- 
ing with a gun. The result is, that when 
an inspired millionaire gets started he is 
more ashamed of himself than anyone else 
could possibly be. He becomes ashamed 
of his whole class, and of the years be- 
fore he was born. In former days, when 
the rich man had the mountains and the 
valleys and the holes under the ground 
with which to fight the poor man, he was 
taking away where his food was, and where 
his body was buried. And now he has 
added machines and taken away his hands, 
and he has not merely taken away his hands 
— made them empty, useless things, mere 
flourishes on his trunk — but he has taken 
away his soul. Formerly, when a rich 

S6 



man fought with a poor one, he let him Millionaire's 
fight out doors, let him have a whole sky p^^g^ "^ ' 
to fight under, and the breath of heaven. 
The way he fights with him now is to shut 
him up with a cog, ten hours a day, until 
he is a cog himself. The damage the rich 
man has done with the machine in taking 
away the poor man's hands, — the new, 
strange babyishness and helplessness of 
his hands, is nothing to the damage that 
is done in taking away his brains ten 
hours a day, in making them sick and 
helpless, and vague, and mean, and full of 
evil, and weakness, and wrath. When a 
man's brain has been shut in with a lever 
or a cog ten hours a day, when his brain 
has become a mere click on his shoulders 
— and a particular kind of click at that — 
to go with the click of the particular 
machine that is turning out his life be- 
side him, the problem of how to get on 
with such a man, the problem of whether 
more money can be made out of him by 
crushing him more, and throwing him 

57 



Inspired away, or by letting him be slowly put 
Millionaires togg^jjer, SO that he will work better, is the 
question to be faced. The inspired mil- 
lionaire finds himself weighing these 
facts. He sees what the men who have 
gone before him have done. He looks 
over the remnants of men they have left 
him for carrying on the business, and what 
is there he can do? They had Long 
Johns. He cannot get them. What is 
the best he can do, with the men he has? 
So it becomes the daily problem of the 
inspired millionaire, " What are the con- 
ditions of work and habits of mind that 
need to be arranged for, in my factory, 
to make men who work with machines, 
keep thinking of things? " 



S8 



// 

WA TE B 

And Elijah said : Fill four barrels rvith water 
and pour it on the burnt sacrifice and on the wood.'' 
And he said, Do it the second time.^ And they did 
it the second time. And he said, Do it the third 
time.'' And they did it the third time.'''' 



An Arrangement for Being Allowed to 
Think. 

THERE are many details and diffi- 
culties that need to be considered, 
and it takes a great deal of patience and 
repetition and self-restraint, to arrange 
and conduct a factory in such a way that 
men are allowed to think in it. 

Out of the maiy methods that might be 
employed for this purpose, it may be well 
in this second section of this book to pick 
out one method and deal with it con- 
cretely. 

The method proposed may not be the 
best one in itself, perhaps, but it is 
brought forward as the one which best il- 
lustrates the general principle that would 
be likely to run through any or all meth- 
ods an inspired millionaire might employ. 

It is not claimed for this method that 

6i 



Inspired it solvcs the problem in all of its details. 
Millionaires ^^^ j ^^ believe that it is a good sample 

method, and that operated by an employer 
who believes in it, and applied strictly to 
employees who believe in it and deserve 
it, it contains the principle that goes to 
the root of the matter. If a factory is 
to have hve men scattered through the 
machines in it, — that is, if it is to be a 
hve factory through and through — it 
must arrange for an exchange system of 
employment as well as a specialist one. 

The idea is not that this exchange sys- 
tem of employment should be applied to 
the rank and file of the factory, but that 
the few men in every factory who are cre- 
ative, who have it born in them to master 
a whole factory by degrees, who are capa- 
ble of overflowing their work, like Vree- 
land, the brakeman (who overflowed into 
a whole railroad), should have ample 
provision made for them, both for the 
sake of the factory and for themselves. 
The main feature of this plan is that every 
62 



man shall be given a chance, if he wants An 

it, at the rest of the factory, shall be al- fo^B^fn^^" 

lowed within certain limits to choose ap- Allowed to 

Think 

prenticeships all his life, to spend part of 
his working-time and a regular part of it, 
in doing other men's work. 

The reason for this is not merely that 
men who keep growing and who always 
have something young and new before 
them, will pay in the long run and do bet- 
ter work from day to day as they go back 
to their own machines. Many of them 
will secure unexpected results on the 
machines they are merely wondering 
about and cannot run and do not under- 
stand. 

Almost all inventions in behalf of 
women have come from men who have 
been obliged, for some sudden reason or 
for a little while, to do women's work. 
Photography has developed more in ten 
years by the blunders of amateurs than 
it has in forty by the labors of profes- 
sionals. Modern industry is a race of in- 
63 



Inspired ventions against inventions. The soul of 
MiUionaires jj^ygj^^JQj^ [^ ^ot regularity, or even ac- 
curacy, or any of the other things that 
are grown in a man by being too intimate 
with a machine. The power in a mind 
that makes for invention is its skill in 
turning irregularity and blundering into 
inspiration. The inventive mind works 
by cross-fertilizing. It minds its own 
business, but it minds it with a large and 
sometimes rather useless-looking margin. 
A machine is quite as likely to be im- 
proved by a man who does not quite know 
how to work it, as it is by one who does. 
A man who comes over from some other 
machine and wonders — who visits a 
machine with his mind a day or so — may 
accompHsh more with it than a man who 
works with it all his life. 

It is as good a principle in industry and 
in mechanics as it is in law, medicine, and 
the arts, and in biology, that specialization 
is a source of weakness as well as strength. 
It is as true of factory hands as it is of 
64 



silk worms, Jerseys, chrysanthemums, An 

and horses, that the breeding of special fo^Bet^*" 

qualities breaks down vital force. The AUowedto 

Think 

men who do the inventive and revolution- 
ary things in machinery are the men who 
put something with something else, and 
factories that do large things in the long 
run are only going to be able to do them 
by having a high average of large men in 
them, men who can do more than one 
thing, and who, for that reason, can make 
combinations, and invent devices, of which 
the mere specialist would never think. 

Experience in dealing with different 
grades of factory hands in strikes goes 
to show that a man who thinks can be de- 
pended upon to think, generally, as much 
as the kind of machine he works with 
will let him think. After a long struggle, 
factory owners were convinced that light 
and air in factories, for men's bodies, paid. 
The next thing they are going to allow 
for, is light and air for their minds. They 
are going to see that almost any kind of 

6s 



Inspired wastc can be better afforded in a factory 
MiUionaires ^j^^^ wasting men's minds. Throwing away 
a machine now and then is nothing — com- 
pared to throwing away a man who could 
think of a machine. It is a mere matter 
of experiment and competition when all 
factories will find this out, and will treat 
their men accordingly. They will realize 
that to put a man for five, ten, or fifteen 
years into solitary confinement with a 
machine, is really to throw away the ma- 
chine and the man both. 

Long John was discharged because he 
wanted to keep on being a man. Many 
men's faults are virtues that a factory 
management is not shrewd enough to use. 
The real trouble with Long John was, 
that, as the superintendent said: " He 
could not keep in his place." He was 
always wanting to do other men's work. 
When he learned to do a thing, and could 
do it perfectly, he wanted to do something 
else perfectly. As long as he found him- 
self, body and soul, acting on the machine, 

66 



he kept at it. The moment his work be- An 

. 1 • 1, Arrangement 

came mechanical, and the machme began {^^ geing 
to act on him, he wanted to ffive it up. It Allowed to 

. , Think 

is not unreasonable that mechanics who 
really have something on their minds 
should be allowed to move within certain 
limits at least, when their minds move, and 
that a man like Long John, instead of 
being discharged for being interested in 
machinery, should be given as many ma- 
chines as he likes. 

In everything except manufactures this 
general principle has been proved again 
and again. It is acknowledged to be a 
mere matter of business common sense 
and foresight, that if a Cab Company is 
going to make money out of its horses it 
must allow them to keep on being horses. 
The most available method in a machine 
shop of allowing men to keep on being 
men would seem to be to give them the 
freedom of the shop at times and let them 
go about thinking in it. Within certain 
limits a part of every man's labor should 
67 



Inspired be deliberately sacrificed to apprentice- 
MiUionaires ^j^j^ ^^^ experiment for the benefit of aU 

concerned. The men in the shops who 
are going to think of the most improve- 
ments are going to be the men who come 
in practical contact with the most things 
that need to be improved. They will get 
into the habit of shifting ideas from one 
department to another, or from one 
machine to another, a habit of putting 
things together. The money that is 
often spent in giving prizes to employees 
for ideas would be a great deal better 
spent, in the long run, in giving them 
room to have the ideas. The most 
natural way of making room in a man's 
mind, of letting him visit in other men's 
ideas and letting them visit in his, is to let 
him try to do the work of the other men. 



63 



11. 

Superintendents and Ideas 

IT IS obvious that several practical 
difficulties would have to be overcome 
in establishing a system of partial rotary 
employment in a factory. The first 
thing to do with such a plan would seem 
to be to find a superintendent who beUeves 
in it. The second thing to do, if one 
failed to find a superintendent who be- 
lieved in it, would be not to try it. It is 
not claimed for the idea that it could be 
carried out by a man who does not believe 
in it. On the other hand, there is some 
ground for the opinion that when the in- 
spired millionaire has overcome the first 
difficulty — has found a man who beheves 
in it, the solution of most of the other dif- 
ficulties will be found well under way. 

Perhaps it might be well to state what 
kind of man such a manager would be 
69 



Inspired likely to be, if he is to be successful in 
Miiuonaires carrying out his belief. He wiU begin, I 
believe, by having it explicitly understood 
among all concerned that, in taking the 
position of manager or superintendent of 
the factory, he is taking it as the personal 
representative and champion of every 
man who works in it, and of every man 
who owns it, and of the great public 
outside that is buying its goods. 
He will proceed on the principle that 
every act of every day of his life is to be 
governed by the interests of these three 
groups of men, that in proportion as he 
can braid these interests together, make 
them inextricably mutual and keep them 
so, he is establishing a permanent and 
prosperous career for both the business 
and himself. 

The first objection such a superintend- 
ent would encounter in attempting to in- 
troduce a partial rotary system of em- 
ployment in his factory would probably 
come from the union men. The labor 
70 



unions would oppose it on the ground Superintend- 
that it would lead to the discovery of more 5^^^^° 
men, and of more men's actual qualities 
at more points, than would be otherwise 
possible, and would inevitably result in 
the giving of more freedom and wages 
to some men than to others. The labor 
unions have not outgrown the idea of 
treating all men alike. The firm would 
oppose it on the ground that if a factory 
is alive all through, and many of the men 
are able to do a great many things, it is 
harder to keep the secrets in the business 
from the public, and the secrets in the 
profits from the men, and more difficult 
to keep the men and the public both from 
insubordination. It is obvious that the 
only man who can manage an unbusiness- 
Hke situation — that is, a situation of 
mutual distrust like this — is a superin- 
tendent who has, as his first business 
equipment, the supremacy and the probity 
of his own personal character. As long 
as it is neither possible nor desirable to run 
71 



Inspired a great business without secrets, the only 
Millionaires ^^^ ^j^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^ Superintendent of a 

live firm with secrets, and of a factory 
that is alive all through and likes to know 
secrets, is the man who can keep secrets 
with fairness, and who can win and hold 
personal confidence on all sides. He will 
not be looked upon by the employees (like 
most superintendents) as the hired man 
of the Firm. He will be too much of a 
man to belong to anybody and not to be- 
long to the whole business from the bot- 
tom to the top, and he will be looked upon 
by employees, and by the Firm, both, as 
their personal representative in dealing 
with the other. 

I am ready to admit that if an inspired 
millionaire desired to acquire a superin- 
tendent with a first-class mind or a busi- 
ness-imagination like this, he would find 
it hard to attract him with an ordinary 
salary. But I am inclined to believe that, 
as things are going now, we are Hkely to 
see in the near future an entirely new rank 
72 



or grade of mind in the positions of super- Superintend- 
intendents. All of these innumerable i^eas*" 
anonymous owners of factories — these 
stockholders and drawers of dividends 
and interest, their huge pulpy, helpless, 
unmanned capital mounting up over their 
heads — are slowly and painfully being 
brought to the point where they will en- 
tirely change their idea of the price that 
it pays to pay for manning capital and 
making it alive all through. The proba- 
bilities seem to be that if our millionaire;? 
are able to secure such a man as I have 
described, to conduct their money for 
them, they will not only be glad to do it 
on the specific condition that he shall con- 
duct it freely and according to his own 
ideas, but they will realize how much it is 
worth to have a man who can. The indi- 
cations are that when our modern money 
is being generally invested once more, on 
far-sighted or human principles, it is not 
going to be the man who furnishes the 
money for the business nor the man who 

73 



Inspired does the woik, but the man who holds the 
Millionaires ^^^^^^^^ together — who makes it alive aU 
over — who shall receive the largest in- 
dustrial rewards. The large-minded, in- 
gathering, centripetal superintendent, the 
man who, by his human nature, his per- 
sonal qualities and insights, brings all the 
sources of power in a business to a head, 
is going to be allowed, as a matter of 
course, by all concerned, the highest pre- 
mium that business affords. When the 
crash comes and the successful superin- 
tendent under the present regime — the 
man who conducts business on the prin- 
ciple of suspended hostility — goes for- 
ever out of power, and the new type of 
man steps forward to his place, the man 
who believes that being human is practical 
and good business, no one will find fault 
with him for getting rich. He will be 
watched with relief, and everybody will 
fall in and help. Everybody will see that 
if a superintendent can be found, who 
really has a soul, he ought to be paid a sal- 

74 



ary which shall approximate to the actual Superintend- 
market value a soul has, in this modern l^ea^^ 
business world. A man who has the spirit- 
ual power of putting himself in the place 
of everybody and holding everybody in 
place, who is doing, or as good as doing, 
everybody's work, can be as rich as he likes. 
Nobody in a factory will quarrel with the 
fact that he ought to have more profit in 
proportion than the millionaire or the pro- 
ducer, or laborer, or than everybody. 
He uses his profit to give everybody a 
chance. To let such a man get rich is put- 
ting money in one's pocket. 

Under these conditions it does not seem 
to me that (especially when a few sample 
superintendents have become known 
throughout the country) the imprac- 
ticability of getting such superintendents 
will be so verj^ great. I cannot help be- 
lieving that the first moment we have live 
superintendents over these great fac- 
tories of ours — these little cities of 
machines — the factories will be al- 

75 



Inspired lowcd to be alivc too. While it is true 
Millionaires ^j^^^ there are very few such superintend- 
ents occupying positions now, and that, 
under present conditions, even those are 
working under enormous difficulties, and 
under protest, I believe that these men 
have been made, and are biding their time 
in our modern business world. The indi- 
cations are that the first moment our mod- 
ern capital, which at present, in a kind 
of brutal, stunned, morally-underwitted 
mood, seems to be lunging along, is sud- 
denly jarred into its senses, and wakes up, 
and sees how helpless it really is without 
men like this — the men will be there. I 
place my faith in these men. If I am 
wrong and it is really true that such men 
are not to be had for our factories, that, 
they are not being made, it would pay our 
great millionaires to give up starting fac- 
tories for awhile, altogether, and try 
churches. 

Factories are not alive all through be- 
cause they are not organic. The best they 
76 



have attained as yet, most of them, is a Superintend- 
sort of organized suspended hostility. ^^^^^^ 
The real reason that factories are not or- 
ganic and cannot become organic is that 
nobody believes in anybody. It is getting 
to be a literal business truth that what the 
typical modern factory most needs to go 
with its plant to-day is a creed — or pos- 
sibly a church on the premises, where all 
the people in the factory could go — mas- 
ter and workmen — and kneel together 
until they amount to something — that is, 
amount to enough, have religion and in- 
sight enough, to work their souls together. 
Business is being done on so large a scale 
and so far ahead that it is getting to be no 
longer practical not to have a soul in it. 
If a man is going to be a superintendent 
or a worker, if he is going into business 
in the twentieth century, let him get down 
on his knees. The next great event in the 
business world is going to be a religious 
event, the making of men who shall have 
it in them to tie to great faiths, to the great 

77 



Inspired permanent facts of human nature and of 
Millionaires ^j^^ humau Spirit — sileut, serene, believing 
men, who carry great burdens with glad- 
ness and boyishness and who do their liv- 
ing and working in some great daily faith 
in one another. 

It is obvious that the next best substi- 
tute in a factory, for a church on the 
grounds — some place for smelting the 
men together — is to have a superintend- 
ent who is a sort of church all by himself. 



78 



Ill 

Unions and Ideas. 

WHEN the inspired millionaire has 
secured for his factory as super- 
intendent, or Soul of the Business, a man 
who believes that souls are a necessary 
part of the running gear of a factory, the 
whole matter of carrying out some ex- 
change system, or partial-rotary system of 
emplojmient for the men who want it, 
becomes one of determining and adjusting 
details. The two main horns of the 
dilemma, in allowing souls in factories, 
would seem to be met at the outset by the 
character of the superintendent. 

The men in the labor unions who would 
object at first to a system of apprentice- 
ship a part of each day or week, would ob- 
ject on the ground that if the entire fac- 
tory is going to be thrown open to every- 
body in it — exposed to a procession of 

79 



Inspired men thinking of things, no one man in the 
Millionaires ^j^^^^ establishment would feel secure in 

his place. He feels that some one might 
come along at almost any minute who will 
know more (by accident almost) about his 
work, or about his machine, than he does. 
So he takes his stand in favor of shutting 
every man carefully in with his own little 
click of skill. He does not think himself, 
but he knows that no one else will be let in 
to think, and feels safe. The conditions 
may have forced it upon him, but to a de- 
gree it must be admitted that this man, 
standing there cHcking his little click day 
after day, all by himself, is at bottom some- 
thing of a coward. If everything is being 
left open in the factory, if the machines 
are being ventilated every day or so with 
men pouring through them, he fears that 
it will be found out that he has a better 
place than belongs to him. He makes up 
his mind he will keep it whether it belongs 
to him or not. A state of affairs in which 
he will have to defend himself from other 
80 



men's thinking of things about his machine, Unions and 
by going out and thinking of things for ^^ 
theirs, fills him with forebodings, and mor- 
alizing, and a love of making rules for 
those who are ahead. So he persuades the 
labor union to hold labor down. "Do not 
allow this thinking of things," he says, " to 
go on." " Keep your place and let every- 
body else keep his. Do not let the ma- 
chines in our factory, or the men beside 
the machines, or the factory as a whole, 
improve or grow any more than can be 
helped." 

Under the mechanical system that gen- 
erally obtains in our factories there is no 
denying that this position of the employee 
is natural. Given another system, how- 
ever, which is based on daily human in- 
sights into human possibilities, which has 
a superintendent who makes it the soul of 
the business to discover the best qualities 
of all his men, and put those best qualities 
where they will work best, it is obvious that 
the whole situation of the individual em- 

8i 



Inspired ploycc is changed. He would discover in 
Millionaires ^^^^ ^^ ^^ ^^^^ j^-g superintendent in, that 

his interests and the interests of the super- 
intendent, and the factory are identical, 
that the most creative, and interesting, the 
most self -expressive and natural thing 
that he can do, or think of to do, in that 
factory will be the thing that, sooner or 
later, will come into his hands. He will 
feel sure of this because it is the policy of 
the factory, and will earn the most money 
for him, and for everybody else. 

The other objection that men in the 
unions would make to allowing men 
around thinking in factories, would be, 
that it would result in the promotion of 
some men at the expense of others. This, 
also, Hke the objection that has just been 
described, is met by the character, that is, 
by the business equipment, of the super- 
intendent. When an employee thinks of 
something of enormous value to the firm 
and is suddenly elevated above the rest, in 
proportion to the value of what he has 
82 



thought of, several things promptly hap- Unions anpd 
pen, if the factory is not a live factory. ^^ 
Three parties in the factory, if anyone 
suddenly thinks, are sure to feel injured, 
and to set to work to defend themselves. 
The common hands do not want a man out 
of their own grade promoted over their 
heads, because he will receive a benefit 
from what he has thought of, which they 
will not share, and which may be employed 
against them. The members of the firm 
promptly line up in the same posi- 
tion. There is danger that the man 
will employ his invention against 
the firm. He may use it either 
to extort privileges for himself, or to 
leave the factory, and sell to rivals. So 
it comes to pass in the typical ordinary 
factory which does not believe in being 
alive, that if a man suddenly acts in it as 
if he were alive, a minute, he finds his hand 
is against every man, and every man 
against his. A penalty on being alive is 
crowded into every cog and wheel of ma- 
ss 



.ispired chincpy and into every crevice of manhood 

Millionaires ^^^^^ ^j^^ ^^^^^ 

Given another system and a superin- 
tendent who believes something, and the 
situation is changed. The character of 
the superintendent, instead of driving 
every man back upon his own interests 
against all the others, acts as a tremendous 
centripetal force, holds all of the interests 
of all the men together. The man who 
is promoted for thinking of something 
knows that the superintendent will see to 
it that his reward will be great, that he will 
not be treated as a mere hand, but will have 
his fair share, no matter what his position 
is, of the actual money his invention has 
earned for the firm. He knows also, 
through the superintendent, that his fac- 
tory will make it a point to make better 
terms with him than any other would. In 
other words, the more a man thinks in such 
a factory, the more everything he thinks 
identifies him with it. 

The same principle holds good of the 
84 



other factors in the situation. The men Unions and 
over whose heads a man has been pro- 
moted for thinking, instead of opposing 
his promotion, will be sure to desire it. 
They will know that the superintendent is 
looking out for their interest. The only- 
reason that men object to a man's being 
promoted over their heads, is that superin- 
tendents do not make them feel that the 
man's success is going to be theirs, as well 
as his, that their interests and his are iden- 
tified, and that everybody — more or less 
— has really been promoted with him. It 
is because the men who have belonged to 
the laboring class in modern industry, and 
who have thought of things, and risen out 
of it, have not acted or been influenced to 
act as saviors with their inventions, or as 
redeemers of their class ; it is because they 
have seemed to turn against their class as 
they rose, have shared with the men above 
them, and never with the men below — 
that the prejudice of the present-day la- 
boring man against allowing a laboring 
8s 



Inspired man to improvc, has grown so insur- 

Millionaires ■ t_i 

mountable. 

Given a superintendent who believes 
that meii who work with machines can 
have souls, who sees that the manufactur- 
ing business is really the business of put- 
ting men's souls together and making 
them work, and not a mere business of 
putting together fragments of iron and 
glass and wood — the situation is changed. 
The factory becomes organic and alive 
all through. The first moment a man 
really thinks of something the factory 
feels the glow and thrill of it all over. In 
such a factory the employees and owners 
and the public become as members of one 
body moving and growing in conscious 
health, and in strength and joy together. 
The very things that to-day look difficult 
and impossible become a matter of course. 

It is not denied that a hve factory, like 
a spirited horse, would be much harder to 
have under one sometimes, than a dead 
one. But the kind of superintendent who 

86 



does not enjoy a live problem squirming Unions and 
under him day after day, who does not 
prefer a seething, rising and falling mass 
of living and thinking, going on under 
him, is the kind whose days are numbered. 
The inspired millionaire, instead of giving 
up the idea of having a live factory be- 
cause a humdrum superintendent would be 
thrown by it, is going to give up the hum- 
drum superintendent. He is going to 
suspect that a man who is made of machin- 
ery on one side, and stock-exchange on 
the other, with all the human nature be- 
tween squeezed out, is the last man who 
can make a success of running a great 
business with machines. He is going to 
suspect that the power of conducting a 
great enterprise that is filled with the 
hum of machines, instead of being a 
machine-hke power — a power of precision 
— must be at bottom a human, artistic, or 
divining power in a man, the power of put- 
ting oneself in the place of other men and 
of making them know it. 
87 



Inspired The assertion that a superintendent like 

1 lonaires ^j^.^ -^ impracticable, that such men cannot 

be found for such positions is only true 
temporarily. The reason that the more 
heroic type of man in modern times, the 
kind of man who used to be a soldier or an 
artist in the days gone by, has not been at- 
tracted by the factories and the milhon- 
aires we have been so largely hav- 
ing of late, is that the conditions both 
among the machines and among the mil- 
lionaires have been becoming impossible. 
A man such as I have described can only 
take a position by changing conditions 
both for himself and for everybody else. 
The practical difficulty in many cases is 
not in the condition of the men, nor of 
the man, who might be superintendent, 
but in the millionaire. The million- 
aire finds, as a matter of experience, that 
the kind of man he would really like for 
the position of manager is a man who can- 
not quite be managed. Then he tries to 
manage him. The real trouble is with the 
millionaire. He has had it proved to him, 

88 



over and over again, that the men that Unions and 
can be managed cannot manage anyone 
else. And when it comes to making an 
actual choice between a second-rate super- 
intendent who can be controlled by money, 
and the man of the highest order of gifts 
who is controlled by his own gifts, the 
millionaire chooses the second-rate super- 
intendent. So, as a rule, we have had sec- 
ond-rate factories with money on top of 
the superintendent, and machines on top of 
the men from the bottom to the top. The 
only way out of this difficulty is a change 
of heart on the part of the millionaire, the 
conviction that if the money in a great busi- 
ness wants to make more money, it must be 
more modest, must make heavy conces- 
sions at the start to brains and insight. 
The man who sees things, cannot be had 
except by men who will let him do them. It 
does not interest him to be a mere helpless 
adviser — a dictionary or glossary of busi- 
ness, a man to be run into, or looked up, 
who sells httle flashes of insight on things 
89 



Inspired that he cannot do, to people who cannot 
Millionaires ^^ ^^^^ ^j^^ ^j^^j^ arrangement is 

superficial and blind, and from hand to 
mouth. He knows that great [business 
enterprises, except for a short time, cannot 
be conducted in this way, by brains inter- 
rupted by money. He has the spirit and 
the attitude of the artist and the only kind 
of money that in the long run controls him 
is the money that buys the whole of him, 
buys the man and his ideas together, on 
the condition that he shall carry them out. 
Only a few men can do it, but the men who 
make money for others best, are those who 
can be told to treat it as their own. In 
proportion as the money in a business and 
the brains are inextricably identified, the 
more it is going to succeed. If the money 
and the brains are not already together in 
the same man, two courses are possible to 
try to gain this identity. One course is 
for the money to make a hired man of the 
brains and get a hired man's result. And 
the other is for the money to give up to the 
90 



brains and be ruled by them. The first Unions and 

1 , . i i J? Ideas 

course results m our present system oi 
second-rate factories and the general slave 
system of modern industry from the bot- 
tom to the top. The second course is com- 
ing in soon, because all it has to do is to 
wait for the first to be played out. It is 
merely a matter of things becoming bad 
enough before they are better. With 
money bullying at the top, and foremen 
bullying all the way down through, the 
general idea that men who work with 
machines cannot have souls, and had better 
not have brains if they can help it, is abun- 
dantly justified. The moment that our 
great millionaires, as a class, have come to 
the point where they deal with other men's 
spiritual powers as respectfully as they do 
with their dollars, the whole manufactur- 
ing world will begin to be placed on a new 
footing. The time is not far off when it 
will be generally taken for granted by aU 
concerned that the controlling factor, the 
strategic position in industry, instead of 
91 



Inspired belonging to the man who has the money, 
Millionaires ^^ ^^ ^j^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ work, belongs 

to the superintendent, the man who has the 
ideas, the great faiths of the business — 
who is the soul of the business, who holds 
the owners, and the men, and the plant in 
his hands, and is putting them together. 

Modern industry is daily hving, in this, 
beginning of the twentieth century, in fear 
and slavery, and drudgery all the way 
through, because it is sick industry. And 
it can never be anything else but sick until 
it acknowledges that the soul must be as 
supreme in business, as it is in everything 
else. Even as it is, it is only the soul 
struggling up through in it which keeps 
it alive. It is not possible to have a great 
industry in a great nation a long time, 
without humble millionaires — until the 
men with brute force, the men who are top- 
heavy and dull with money, are seen giv- 
ing place gladly, for their own defense 
as well as the defense of all of us, to the 

men who have spiritual powers in business, 

92 



who see things and do things by using Unions and 
their souls daily, and by getting the use of 
the souls of others. There is no reason 
why a factory, if enough soul is poured 
in with the money at the top, should not 
be as spiritual as a church, and as educa- 
tional as a school, in the town where it 
stands. It would be a kind of ceaseless 
church — or a church at least ten hours 
a day. And every time a man thought of 
his work, it would rest and Hght his soul. 
His work would become to him a part of 
the vision of the making of a world, a 
daily, hourly unfolding, a kind of pan- 
orama of his larger self, reaching out be- 
fore him. The look of the youth would 
lurk in his eyes (as it does in all who really 
live) down to the farthest slope of old 
age. 

There is as much room for imagination 
— the habit of visiting in things with one's 
mind — and of being young and fresh 
before them, in a machine shop as there is 
in poetry. When machine shops are con- 

93 



Inspired ductcd Es they are going to be, the men 

Millionaires ^j^^ ^^^^ ^ ^^^^ ^^^ j^^^^ ^ ^^ ^^^ ^^ 

machines like this) are going to be more 
creative men, more expressive, progres- 
sive, and original in their work than any 
other men we have. The idea that there 
is something in a machine simply as a 
machine which makes it inherently unspir- 
itual is based upon the experience of the 
world, but it is after all a rather amateur 
and juvenile world with machines as yet. 
Its ideas are in their first stages and are 
based for the most part upon the world's 
experience with second-rate men, working 
in second-rate factories, men who have 
been bullied, and could be bullied, by the 
machines they worked with into being 
machines themselves. No one would 
think of denying that men who let 
machines get the better of them either in 
their minds or their bodies in any walk 
of life, grow unspiritual and mechanical. 
But it does not take a machine to make a 
machine of a man. Anything will do it 

94 



if the man will let it. Even the farmer Unions and 
who is out under the great free dome of ^^ 
heaven and working in wonder every day 
of his life grows like a clod if he buries 
his soul ahve in the soil. But farming 
has been tried many thousands of years 
and the other kind of farmer is known by 
everybody, — the farmer who is master 
over the soil, who instead of becoming an 
expression of the soil himself, makes the 
soil express him. The next thing that is 
going to happen is, that everyone is going 
to know the other kind of mechanic. It 
is cheerfully admitted that the kind of 
mechanic we largely have now, who allows 
himself to be a watcher of a machine, a 
turner-of -something for forty years, can 
hardly be classed as vegetable life. He is 
not even organic matter, except in a very 
small part of himself. But it is not the 
mechanical machine which makes the man 
unspiritual. It is the mechanical man 
beside the machine. A master at a piano 
(which is a machine) makes it a spiritual 

95 



Inspired thing, and a master at a printing press, 
Millionaires jjj^^ William Morris, makes it a free and 
artistic and self -expressive thing. 

It is only a second-rate order of labor- 
union and administration that is not going 
to recognize this, that will not so arrange 
a man's work with a machine eight hours 
a day as to develop the man and the 
machine together. It is true that it will 
be difficult to arrange, in the beginning, 
and that only the millionaire who believes 
in it, and wants it a great deal, will be able 
to arrange it, and he will only be able to do 
it through a superintendent who believes 
in it as he does. There can be no doubt 
that the moment there appears a richly- 
endowed millionaire who sees this sort of 
thing there will appear a richly-endowed 
superintendent to go with him. The 
moment that the man of intellectual 
genius — of spiritual insight — even of 
dramatic insight (the power of knowing 
men's souls in crowds at a glance) is rec- 
ognized as the suitable superintendent for 
96 



a factory, the whole drift of the Hf e with Unions and 
machines will change. The very things 
that now tend to keep the machines on top 
of the men in factories will begin to put 
men on top of machines. When the new 
type of superintendent comes, we shall 
begin to feel new things about the ma- 
chines and the men beside the machines — 
the very sound of machines through the 
windows on the street, shall bring at last 
wide, rested thoughts to us. As we go 
by, we shall think of the machines every- 
where, spelling freedom and joy around 
the earth. 



97 



I 



IV 

The Skilled Labor of the Poor 

T is not denied that, under a partial- 
rotary system — the allowance of part 
time for doing other men's work — there 
would be a falling off in quantity and 
quality of work at first, but it is believed 
that whatever a factory may lose tempo- 
rarily by having the employees who desire 
it, apprentices part of the time, it will gain 
many times over by bringing fresh and 
creative minds every day of the year, and 
a great many of them, to bear upon old 
difficulties, minds that suggest methods 
and think of things, out of their very 
ignorance, which never have been thought 
of before. 

It is not denied that a superintendent 
who carries out this policy will have to 
begin slowly and perhaps with all against 

him at first. But he can at least begin 

98 



by making sure of the fresh young men, The SkiUed 
and of those who have kept fresh, and who p^^°' ° 
have kept growing among the older ones. 
Gradually when the whole soul of the 
business is seen by all to be turning on it 
— upon the daily discovery, developing, 
and sorting out of men, the whole factory 
will respond to it. Instead of the super- 
intendent's problem being what it is now, 
how to defend the stronger men from the 
weak, and the men who can work, and 
want to work, from those who do not, the 
problem will be inverted — will be one of 
getting the strong to divide with the weak, 
as they grow stronger, until all the weak 
are drawn in with them, and all work to- 
gether. If the employers are voluntarily 
and habitually generous, if they make 
common cause with their best men, the best 
men will make common cause with the men 
below and the whole factory will be keyed 
to a new spirit. 

It is by no means claimed that a partial- 
rotary system of employment will make 

99 



Inspired all machinists inventors. But it will nat- 

Millionaires -,', j • 'j j. n i j? 

urally and incidentally make a lew men 
inventors, and by giving every man a 
chance, and a good many kinds of chance, 
it will discover which those few are, and 
more of them. It will be generally rec- 
ognized by all, that a soul in a machine 
shop is as valuable as anywhere else. The 
chief attribute of the workman's soul is 
his imagination, the mind's power of visit- 
ing around in things, and of putting them 
together. To say that a man with an 
imagination in a machine shop is worth 
his weight in gold, is to put it mildly. It 
is the very essence of a machine shop, of 
all places in the world, that the skilled 
labor of the hands is reduced to its lowest 
terms and the skilled labor of the mind 
or soul is all that is left, and wins the 
highest possible premium. A man in a 
machine shop who has an imagination 
does his thinking in armies. Every 
machine he thinks of is a crowd. Great 
buildings full of din and might build 



themselves with a thought, and cities and The Skilled 

fortunes flock to him. To be spiritual in p^^"'^ ° 

a factory, to be spiritual with raw material 

like machines, to have a thought that is 

like miles of men in a minute, to put two 

bits of steel together with an echo around 

the world — it is incredible that anyone 

could ever have had the idea that a man 

who works in a machine shop cannot have 

a soul and cannot work in the spirit of the 

artist. 

The inspired millionaire is through with 
it. He is going to believe that the more 
spirit a factory-hand has in proportion to 
the amount of matter in him, the more 
matter he can get hold of both for himself 
and for everybody else. He is going to 
believe that the more spiritual a factory 
is, the more it emphasizes spirit and pays 
for it, the bigger material success it will 
make, and the longer it will make it. He 
is going to beUeve that the more a machine 
shop treats its men like machines, the more 
machines it has, with nothing but ma- 



Inspired chuics tending them, at just so many more 

Millionaires ^^^^^ ^^^^ .^ ^^p^^^ j^^^j^^ ^ half-aUve 

machine shop cannot succeed any more 
than a half -alive anything else. The 
supreme irreverence, and master-stupid- 
ity and infidelity of the present age is 
the idea that it can — the idea that ma- 
chines, the things we do our living with — 
are not meant to be filled with life. It is 
almost a demonstrable fact that most of 
the industrial evils, and nearly all of the 
social and reUgious ones in this age of 
machines, can be traced to the idea that 
in some mysterious and hopeless manner 
God has left a bare spot in creation and 
that the men who work with machines do 
not need to have souls, and that if they do 
need them, they cannot have them. 

Incidentally, the whole question of 
modern civilization is at stake in establish- 
ing a behef in this principle, in getting 
miUionaire manufacturers who will see 
that they are compelled to employ the 
best men, with the best minds that this 



country can produce, millionaires who will The Skilled 

. • 1 • 1 ■ j_ 1 Labor of the 

want everyone to know that they are es- p^^^ 
tabHshing new conditions among the ma- 
chines, who will advertise that the very 
men that factories, under conditions that 
now exist, cannot hire, are the men that 
they are trying to get, that the most im- 
portant part of their machinery to them is 
the live part of it — the men in it. It is 
the soul of the business that if machinery 
is good machinery it will have to be alive 
all through. 

The first millionaire who will really be- 
lieve that a factory can only be a material 
success by being a spiritual one, who will 
put up his fortune on it, who will make a 
sublime wager for modern life, and who 
will attract men from all parts of the 
world and all walks of life to help him 
carry it out, will turn the whole modern 
world around. When one millionaire has 
done it, the rest will follow, will come to 
see by experiment, by comparison, that if 
men in a factory are under the machines 
103 



Inspired in it, it is merely a matter of time when 
MUiionaires ^^^ machines and the men wiU go down 
together. When a manufacturing busi- 
ness fails, the chances are nine out of ten 
that it is because some other manufactur- 
ing company has managed to be spiritual 
at a vital point, that is, — to have an em- 
ployee who thought of something. Men 
were not meant to be under machines. 
Everyone is going to see, when it has been 
given one good, decisive trial, that neither 
the men nor the machines can really be 
made to work in that way — except for a 
little while. There will be nothing a mill- 
ionaire will dread more than these slaves 
and cowards and drudges he has made, and 
that he has scattered among his machines. 
He knows that it is a mere matter of time, 
when some factory in which men are 
allowed to think will get a machine that 
will ruin his. 

It already looks as if the time were not 
far off when machines will be thought of 
so fast in machine shops that think, that 
104 



all others will cease to exist. One can The Skilled 
almost see the day — it is merely around p^g^ 
the corner of the world, I think — when 
all of these under-the-dollar millionaires 
and these under-machine men, and men- 
machines will be wiped from the face of 
the earth. It would be hard to find an 
empty or silent mill anywhere, even to- 
day, which in one way or another, does 
not bear witness to this coming of the 
truth. It is silent and empty because 
someone, somewhere else, has thought of 
something. 



los 



I 



V 

The Skilled Labor of the Rich 

T is W. B. Yeats who has said, in speak- 
ing of poets as a class, " We see the 
perfect more than others, but we must find 
the passions among the people." It is 
this finding the passion among the people 
which makes me hopeful about million- 
aires. If the passion for making money 
is the passion that we actually have in 
America, the next vision for us is going 
to be some way of making what we actu- 
ally have beautiful. The beauty that 
builds the destiny of a nation always lies 
next neighbor to its greatest gift. If 
it is true that wealth is our greatest gift 
in America, — our vision, — it is merely 
a matter of time when America is going to 
show that wealth is full of revelation, and 
creativeness, and beauty, that it is holding 
in its hand the liberties of a world. 

io6 



It is already obvious that the American The Skilled 
people have a great latent, obstinate faith ^^^^ ° 
in rich men and in what they can do and 
be. They are already picking out all over 
the country, semi-inspired millionaires. 
They have their eyes upon them every- 
where. They have no inherent pessim- 
ism or distrust in money as money. It 
was only a year or so ago that it was sug- 
gested by the whole State of Massachu- 
setts in a rather big voice at the polls, that 
finding fault with a millionaire for his 
money is gone by. We joined together 
almost without knowing it, out of all 
parties, and suddenly and quietly on 
election day made W. L. Douglas Gov- 
ernor of Massachusetts because he is rich 
and because we are all glad of it. 

The same men on the same day, who 
were electing a Republican President by 
an enormous majority, elected a demo- 
cratic governor by another enormous 
majority for no other reason that 
anyone can find out, than that W. 
107 



Inspired L. Douglas Seemed to be a man who 
Millionaires ^^^^d make money and men and shoes 
together. If this could be done and there 
was a man in the State who had proved 
that it could be done, all that seemed to be 
needed was pointing. And after care- 
fully seeing to it that the President was 
elected, the people suddenly dropped 
everything else at the bare thought that 
there could be such a man in the State, 
and in a few hours made him Governor of 
Massachusetts. There was not a man 
anywhere, out of all the men of all parties 
who voted for Mr. Douglas, who seemed 
to object to him for being a millionaire. 
Without his money nobody would have 
noticed him. And probably without Mr. 
Douglas nobody would have noticed the 
money. It seemed to be the combination. 
A fortune and a human being lying 
alongside each other, all interpenetrated 
with each other, seemed interesting to the 
people and to the point. The people 
seemed to like Mr. Douglas's money. 

io8 



The more money he had, the more his The Skilled 

, , . , , 1 • ,1 Labor of the 

money meant; and the more things they ^^^^^ 
kept hearing about him the more money 
they wanted him to have. Every dollar of 
it was the autobiography of a kind of man 
that rich men and labor unions had been 
saying for decades could not exist. 

What the situation amounted to, as it 
has seemed to me, was simply this. A 
man that everybody had said could not 
exist had suddenly existed. And some- 
thing had to be done about it. So he was 
made Governor of Massachusetts. 

The real secret of the people, one is in- 
clined to think, in what the papers had 
characterized as an altogether unheralded 
and noiseless revolution, was the sudden 
hopefulness that came to them when they 
heard that Mr. Douglas might be good 
enough to be rich. I have no personal 
knowledge of Mr. Douglas and no very 
definite conviction as to whether this is 
true or not. He may be the merest glim- 
mer toward the inspired millionaire, but 
109 



Inspired the Overwhelming way in which the people 

Millionaires -it j • ±.i t jxj j 

believed m the glimmer, and stood up and 
let their faith be counted, was to me an 
event of profound and national impor- 
tance. It was like an interpretation, a 
reading of the next one hundred years. 

I had been plodding down my own little 
road of behef alone, I thought, or almost 
alone. Suddenly I felt a great multitude 
— silently and out of sight — tramping 
beside me. I had been told at every cross- 
road that our working men were mean- 
spirited, that they were dull and small 
men, seeing only their own side, and 
bitter against the rich. Then sud- 
denly — I heard them — it was like 
a mighty shout, the voice of a great com- 
pany as one man, out there in the 
dark. It was proclaimed upon the house- 
tops, the next morning, what was really in 
their hearts. 



/// 

CLOUDS THE SIZE OF A MAN'S HAND 

And Elijah went up to the top of Carmel, and he 
cast himself dotvn upon the earth and put hisjace between 
his hands. And he said to his servant, go up now, and 
look toward the sea. And he went up and looked and 
said there is nothing. 

And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said. 
Behold there ariseth a little cloud out qf the sea like a 
man's hand.'' 



The Lack of Conveniences for Million- . 
aires 

A GOOD many thoughtful people 
have been trying to find of late 
some slight position, or opening for mil- 
lionaires in this country. There doesn't 
seem to be anything. One can hardly go 
anywhere in the United States the last 
few years without seeing millionaires 
standing in rows — trying to get some- 
thing to do. Sometimes one sees hun- 
dreds of them waiting patiently — these 
plain humdrum millionaires we run to in 
America, waiting in all the cities of the 
world — Paris, Rome, Lucerne — even in 
New York. But nothing comes of it. 

As far as one can see with the naked 
eye, the one single position in the country 
that is vacant just now is that of in- 
spired millionaire. 

113 



Inspired Thosc of US who hold to the conviction 

Millionaires .1 . .1 .,• n • • ^ mt 

that the position oi inspired miUionaire 
in this country is somehow going to be 
filled, are not saying that there is going 
to be anything precipitate about it. We 
do not count on the inspired millionaire's 
coming like a miracle out of the sky, or as 
a great, sudden apocalyptic character 
looming up in Wall Street, or in the life 
of this modern world. A great many 
millionaires will be wasted probably ex- 
perimenting. We will have, as always, 
millionaires who do not intend to be in- 
spired if they can help it, or who want to 
be inspired in some little private, amusing 
way of their own; but there is reason to 
believe we are going to have the inspired 
millionaire, because it cannot be helped. 
The other kinds of millionaires will be 
tried and they will not work. 

The millionaires are being driven to it. 
This is the first cloud the size of a man's 
hand. 

When our typical American man of 
114 



wealth in the course of his natural devel- The Lack of 

Conveniences 



opment comes, sooner or later, to the point 
where he feels that he can afford to face 
the problem of living instead of getting 
a living, the idea of millionaire he most 
naturally attempts is the imported or Eu- 
ropean idea, the gentleman of leisure, the 
en j oyer of the world, who seeks to benefit 
and refine it by the way he spends his 
money, by the ennobhng effect of his 
pleasures. 

It may be a remarkable fact, but it 
looks like a rather true one, that an inspired 
millionaire, in this European sense, viz, a 
man who sets out with a great capacity 
for giving and receiving joy in the world, 
cannot find anything to do in it — that is, 
taking things as they are and without 
touching or changing them he cannot find 
anything to do in it. The world is not 
arranged for inspired millionaires. If a 
millionaire wants to be inspired in it, even 
if he wants to be amused in it, he finds he 
will have to arrange it himself. What is 

"5 



for Millionaires 



Inspired there, for instance, a really inspired mil- 

Millionaires i. . jj. u* ix»x>j.j' 

lionaire can do to amuse himseli alter din- 
ner? Of course, if he could spend a 
night in the whole world at once, ring up 
any continent he has a mind to, for the 
evening, attend opera in Berlin, London, 
San Francisco, or Hong Kong, he might 
find something inspired being said or sung 
somewhere and could drop in for a while ; 
but the arrangements already made in the 
world for an inspired millionaire at any 
given time or place in it, any place that 
can be reached after dinner, are pitiable 
enough. There is hardly any part of the 
land or any day of the year in which it is 
not easier to get a few dollars' worth of 
work than it is to get a million dollars' 
worth of play. He tries everything he 
can think of, that people do after dinner, 
and that they seem to think is play — the 
picture gallery, the concert, the lecture, 
and the club, and the ball, and the theater. 
But he soon finds that the things that have 
creative joy in them — that is, millions of 

ii6 



dollars' worth of joy — are not to be had. The Lack of 

■w-T r» 1 ii • 1 • 1 TVT Conveniences 

He finds they are not being made. No f^^ Millionaires 

one can get joy enough to put into them. 

So, generally, in sheer desperation he thinks 

at last he will stay at home and read. He 

thinks he will read down to the heart of the 

world in its latest books. He will see what 

kind of a world it really is under the noise, 

and what it is really thinking, and feeling, 

and expecting. After a few evenings 

spent in this way he cannot but come to 

two conclusions. There are two facts 

that face him at every turn: 

First. The immeasurable and unprece- 
dented number of men devoting their en- 
tire time to literature and the arts. 

Second. The immeasurable and un- 
precedented number of probabihties, 
judging from their work, that there is 
not a single great, lasting, irreplaceable 
artist among them all. He rather won- 
ders at this at first. " Why is it," he 
thinks, " that with all our improvements, 
our civilization, with all our education, — 
Plato and Homer hold on so? " 

"7 



Inspired If all the aitists of the world in the 

Millionaires ^^^^^^^ yg^j. ^f ^^j. L^^d, 1908, Were put 

together in a single place all by themselves, 
they would make a city a deal larger than 
Athens was, with her processional of im- 
mortals down the years ; and if all the men 
and women who are devoting their entire 
time to writing were gathered together — 
quarantined on an island in the sea, Mada- 
gascar, for instance — these same writers, 
writing — all of them writing, all of the 
time, and writing, and still writing, the 
scratching of their pens rising higher and 
higher, and sounding far and faint to us, 
like some forgotten thing across the surges 
of the sea — these same writers would con- 
stitute a nation all by themselves as large 
as the nation in Palestine ever was, a nation 
which, with very few persons in it who 
could read, and fewer still who could 
write, produced several immortal journal- 
ists — men of their own times, called 
prophets — and two or three very consid- 
erable poets, one of whom wrote the hymn- 



book of three thousand years and another The Lack of 

n 1 iji/?i it-j.* Conveniences 

of whom made the first rough but mi- ^^ Millionaires 
mortal sketch of a God for the human 
heart, and told the news as though it hap- 
pened yesterday of a Man fifteen hundred 
years away. Very few literary men or 
women with notebooks and typewriters 
could have been found about David's 
court. The masterpieces of Isaiah, de- 
livered largely to men who could not read, 
were taken apparently from notes of ex- 
temporaneous addresses here and there, 
and the number of artists that could be 
found in the whole length and breadth of 
Palestine in that day of masterpieces 
could have met together in a hall bedroom 
vrithout crowding each other. The civil- 
ization in which we are living to-day is a 
civilization that has conventions of artists 
in auditoriums, and mass meetings of 
men who do nothing but write. It is a 
civilization which has scores of schools of 
painting and scores of universities of 
music, with fullest courses and the like. 
119 



Inspired It is a civilization which has hundreds of 
Millionaires j-^jQ^g^nds of pcoplc engaged in master- 
ing the footnotes of Shakespeare and 
studying the participles of Homer; which 
has its hbrary on Dante, its miles of ex- 
plaining the masterpieces of the Hebrews, 
and its acres of analysis of the master- 
pieces of Greece, which has scores 
of Chairs that tell men in college 
how to be geniuses, and summer 
schools that tell how other men have 
been geniuses; which has clubs to be 
men of genius in, and clubs for women to 
be women of genius in; which has two 
or three magazines on how to be an 
author; which has two or three hun- 
dred magazines showing what it is sup- 
posed an author ought to be, and three 
or four thousand journals showing what 
an author ought not to be, — is a civiliza- 
tion that (with one exception perhaps) 
has not a single colossal living artist of 
its own. 

Gradually, as the inspired millionaire 



sits down night after night and looks over The Lack of 

,i •, ji'j. 1. ' ±. 1. J ' Conveniences 

these vnriters and tries to get interested m ^^^ MiiUonaires 
them, he gets interested in what is the 
matter with them. He puts the question 
— " Why is it that the more Hterary men 
we have the less our chances seem to be of 
ever having a literature? " He soon 
finds himself facing the fact that this 
modern literature with all its literary look, 
its artistic ingeniousness, its gilt, all its 
poor, sad little trappings of joy about it, 
is not really a literature at all, has not a 
single great structural necessary joy in 
it, lifting itself up, from world's end to 
world's end. Perhaps the modern liter- 
ary world is not great because it is not real 
and is not quite honest. Instead of being 
a real literary world, it is a vast monoto- 
nous prairie of self-support. All these 
hordes of writers, these long processions 
or caravans of authors, if they were to put 
all their creative joy in their work to- 
gether, and pile it up in one place for an 
inspired millionaire after dinner, would 



Inspired not amusc him f OP fivc minutcs. The whole 
Miiuonaires gp^jj^^^^jg ^f modem literature is a weari- 
ness to him — these rows of dreary hired- 
men with pens, timid and expedient, and 
rigidly self -suppressed, with their roofed- 
in, practical minds — these rows of timid 
publishers tiptoeing along before the pub- 
lic eye, their millions of dollars behind 
them, all in a kind of anxious literary 
hush. He sees through it all as he sits 
in his library. He will have nothing to 
do with it. Even an uninspired million- 
aire would not. It was only the other 
day that one of them, when he 
wanted to do something intellectual-look- 
ing (buy something he thought would be 
really literary), bought a hundred-and- 
thirty- thousand- dollar set of Dickens. 
Forty thousand living authors looked on 
in silence. 

The next thing that happens after the 
inspired millionaire has given up encour- 
aging forty thousand living authors after 
dinner, is generally one more struggle 



to be amused with some of the other things The Lack of 

,1, 1, i^i- 1 Tj? J Conveniences 

that people try at first, m modern hf e, and ^^^ Millionaires 
that look amusing until they are found 
out. He soon comes down to hardpan 
in all of them and faces a truth. 

In a country where millions of peo- 
ple, nearly all of the people, are hired 
by the week not to have any joy, that is, 
to keep their ideals and their work apart, 
where even the leading men — the men 
one knows — are drawing salaries for not- 
living, inspired amusements are not to be 
looked for. A man's joy in his work is 
the expressing of his individual self in it. 
If he is doing his work under conditions 
which do not recognize individual selves 
in men, and best selves in them, his work 
can have no joy in it. A man who is 
daily separated in his work from his ut- 
most inspired self soon comes to believe 
that he was never meant to have one. He 
not only believes this, but he believes that 
it is the very nature of work not to have 
inspiration in it. He tries to put his in- 
123 



Inspired spiration into playing after his work is 
1 lonaires ^^^^ Then coHies the fact which is hard- 
est to face of all, especially if a nation 
has to face it. People who spend nearly 
all of their time in doing their work with- 
out inspiration, have very little inspiration 
left to do their playing with. Not having 
inspiration themselves, they do not know 
it when they see it in others. The actors 
and the plays that have creative fire or 
joy in them do not become known among 
such a people. They cannot seem to burn 
their way through to those who might 
want them. Always this same great 
Damp Wall of Public, — this same dear 
anxious, plodding, art-proof, Public. It 
is a world in which the very playhouses 
work. 

If the millionaire goes about hopefully 
from one country to another feeling that 
great actors may yet be found, actors who 
are interested in supporting great plays, 
he finds nothing but small actors — 
crowds of them — supporting themselves. 

1*4 



A getting-a-living public prefers getting- The Lack of 

T •„ , tj. J L ' Conveniences 

a-hving actors. It does not miss any- ^^ Millionaires 
thing in them. The more an actor acts 
to make money out of people of this 
kind, and the more money he makes out of 
them, the more they are impressed, and 
the more they flock to hear him. The in- 
spired millionaire soon learns that if he 
wants to hear a great actor, he must make 
one, and that after he has made him, he 
must make a public for him. The same 
is true not only of the art of acting, but 
of every other art which, by its nature, is 
intended to give joy and to be the expres- 
sion of joy that belongs to life. Hard- 
working people have hard-working arts. 
If an inspired millionaire could go to all 
of the theaters in America at once — go to 
them in one night — is there anyone who 
really supposes, for a single moment, he 
could get his money's worthi . . . 
Herds of tired faces . . . thousands 
of herds of tired and callous faces ... 
the flare of the footlights . . . one 
125 



Inspired sct of tired faccs grimacing at joy out of 

Millionaires ., ,, ,■, j.x»i*jx» 

empty hearts to another set oi tired faces. 

. . . Nothing more pathetic, more 
full of terror, and sadness, and prophecy, 
could possibly be conceived than The 
Spectacle of Audiences — the panorama 
for a single night of the American people 
at its joys. Joy is not in us. We have 
parted from its spirit. And when hard- 
worked people, engaged in supporting 
themselves all day, gather together and 
watch some more hard- worked people sup- 
porting themselves all night, we call it an 
amusement. 

With rare exceptions the only form of 
public entertainment that can be said to 
be open to the average man nowadays — 
the man who is trying to master the prob- 
lem of self-support — is to go and watch 
some other man trying to master it; and 
when this average man has mastered it, be- 
comes an average millionaire, for instance 
— perchance an inspired millionaire — his 
last condition is no better than his first. 
126 



He may have a theory that he does not The Lack of 

J , 1 ,,• T •„ Conveniences 

need to keep on getting a hving any ^^ MiiUonaires 
longer, but in a getting-a-hving world he 
is practically compelled to keep on getting 
a living, whether he wants to or not. 

He cannot find anything else to do. He 
cannot find amusements that are worth 
spending his money on. So he spends it 
on more work, and as spending money on 
more work (reinvesting it) merely means 
having more money to spend on amuse- 
ments he cannot get, the longer a million- 
aire finds himself holding on to life the 
smaller his chance seems to be of doing 
any living in it. Even the kingdom of 
this world is shut against him. It looks 
sometimes as if the saying of Scripture: 
" It is easier for a camel to go through a 
needle's eye than for a rich man to enter 
the Kingdom " must have meant that it 
was no object to the camel — going 
through the needle's eye — even if he 
could. There is no denying that having 
great means to spend in the next world — 
127 



Inspired with the bcst people to spend it with — 
Millionaires ^^^^^^ ]^g ^^^^^ ^o mean something, but 

the more a man has money in this one, the 
more he works on the project of Hving 
with his money instead of getting a liv- 
ing with it, the more he is discouraged. 

Whichever way he turns in human soci- 
ety, where, at first thought, at least, one 
would think beauty, and joy, and rest 
might be, he finds that they are not; or if 
they are, he finds he cannot get at them, 
or that they cannot get at him. The get- 
ting-a-living crowds are in the way. 
They are getting a living. They are 
against every man who is not get- 
ting a living. They want their get- 
ting-a-living things. The world has been 
made convenient for their getting them. 
There is nothing anywhere in modern life 
but this same ceaseless spectacle — the 
spectacle of the Arts being tamely led 
around by a host of pleasant married 
women, white-aproned nurses, and babies 
in go-carts. It is a spectacle of The True 

iz8 



and The Beautiful, and The Good being The Lack of 

T 1 , . 1 J Conveniences 

ground between our two great modern f^^ Millionaires 
millstones, The Home and The Office. 

To one who loves his kind, and watches 
them, who loves to see men doing their 
thinking and living in long spans like 
those that have gone before us, there 
seems to be something a little fussy and 
effeminate about our modern life. One 
can only watch the babies governing their 
mothers, in it, and the mothers governing 
the fathers, and the fathers tramping 
down to the office. And even the office 
— even business, which might seem to be 
heroic, and artistic, and self-expressive in 
a dajT- like this, if anything is — is gov- 
erned by a set of anonymous, vague mil- 
lionaires, who are literally ordering the 
whole planet around from morning till 
night — for a few dollars. There is get- 
ting to be hardly a man on it with whom 
to associate — least of all artists. Not 
that an inspired millionaire would not like 
to associate with them. He would — and 
129 



Inspired with almost anybody — but they all have 
MiUionaires ^^t^hcs ill their hands when he tries to. 
All their time is hired by somebody else. 

The result is, that the more he thinks 
about it, and the more he tries to be 
amused after dinner, the more serious he 
gets. He drifts to the edge of The Preci- 
pice and looks down. 

The Precipice is this: Inspired things 
can only be done by inspired men, by men 
who take time to live inspired lives. An 
inspired miUionaire, a man with a great 
capacity for giving and receiving joy in 
him, cannot help becoming a philanthro- 
pist. He finds that he cannot even be self- 
ish in a world like this without having 
better-made men and women around him 
to be selfish with. He cannot find the 
men and women. The only thing an in- 
spired millionaire can do is to make them. 
He becomes a philanthropist or man- 
maker in self-defense. He comes sooner 
or later to but one object in the world, 
namely, going about, picking out the men 
130 



in it, in all the arts, in all mechanics, The Lack of 

,. , ,., . Ill •• Conveniences 

machine shops, libraries, and laboratories, ^^^ Millionaires 
and everywhere, who have visions, and in- 
ventions, and ideals which they are mak- 
ing sacrifices to put into their labor — and 
giving them a chance to do it. 

This is his program. The first thing 
that happens to his program is that he 
slowly learns that man-making is not only 
the most expensive amusement, but the 
most lonesome one that the world affords. 
We all wish him God-speed. And then 
we get in his way. When one considers 
how many things there are in the course 
of his life a millionaire is obliged to give 
up, this is hard. The first thing he does 
as a young man is to give up amusement 
in order to make money. The next thing 
he does is to try to make an amusement 
out of making the money. Then he has 
to give it up. Then he tries to make an 
amusement out of spending the money. 
He has to give this up also. Then, when, 
as the years go on, the truth leaks out, and 
131 



Inspired he Icams once for all that making money 

Millionaires j t i. xi. i? •! 

and spending money are both failures as 
amusements, because of the men with 
whom one has to do them, and he takes up 
at last with the amusement of making 
men, he finds that the public is against 
him. 

We approve pleasantly and placidly 
enough of making men, but everything 
we do makes men impossible. We are 
not even making men of ourselves, — most 
of us. We have not time. The making 
of men is a peculiar occupation in which a 
man could be expected to spend his time, 
and is left to women and ministers. An in- 
spired millionaire soon finds that he can- 
not get any men to make. Boys want to 
be like their fathers, and their fathers are 
making money. The government is in 
the business of producing conditions in 
which the money can be made. The 
schools and colleges, with a greater or less 
degree of candor, are in the business of 
producing the men who can make it. The 
132 



Church is in the business of doing as well The Lack of 
as it can, trickling the gospel helplessly fo?MXnaTres 
into the stream that sweeps around it and 
away with it. It hopes gently that men 
will do as little wrong as possible in get- 
ting their money, and as much good as 
possible in spending it. In the meantime 
it takes the money if they make it, and 
comforts them if they do not. They need 
a great deal of comforting if they do not. 
The man who has a million dollars in 
his pockets and a philanthropic work on 
his hands soon finds that, so far as his 
philanthropy is concerned, he is one of the 
most lonesome and helpless objects in the 
the world. The world does not want his 
philanthropy. It wants his million dol- 
lars. It does not even want to hear what 
he has to say about his philanthropy. It 
wants to hear how he got his million dol- 
lars. If there is a particular set of poor 
people in whom he is interested, the best 
way for him to raise money for them 
would be to tell other poor people how to 
133 



Inspired get pich. For cvcry hundred dol- 

est the world in his charity, by 
talking about it, he could raise thou- 
sands talking about himself. If he were 
to open an office and give private consul- 
tations, heart-to-heart talks, on how he 
supported himself, he could support a 
dozen charities with his daily fees. Peo- 
ple are not interested in his telling them 
how to help others. They want to be told 
how to help themselves. He finds that 
he is held in esteem and is considered a 
useful member of society because he has 
helped himself the most. He finds that 
he is looked upon as a kind of hero for 
having done it. If there were any ar- 
rangement by which a millionaire could 
be told at sight, if he were compelled by 
law to wear a coat, for instance, with a 
dollar sign on it — amount specified — 
there is scarcely a city in the world where 
he would not be followed by crowds in 
the street. Even as it is, he is often re- 
134 



minded that he is a sight, in spite of him- The Lack of 

1 n rm 1 J • ^ 1 Conveniences 

self. The word passes around if he en- f^^ MiiUonaires 
ters a restaurant, and when he hides in 
his hotel people stand in line to see his 
name on the register. 

The world envies him for one thing, 
and that is the thing it never forgets. 
Whichever way he turns, in his attempt 
to carry out some larger design for the 
world, he finds that his million dollars 
are in the way. He cannot do the work 
alone and he cannot find the men to help 
him. He spends nearly all his time in dis- 
covering that the men who appear to help 
him are helping themselves. They are 
not the same men with him that 
they are with others. They are po- 
larized by his money. He cannot get 
at men, somehow, as they are. He 
finds himself defeated at every point, 
either by his own million dollars, or by 
some one's else million dollars, or by some- 
one's else desire to have his million dollars. 
The whole getting-a-hving machine of 

135 



Inspired modem life is across his path. If, in the 
Millionaires interests of his work, he suggests that 
other people give money, it is hinted that 
he has money of his own to give. If he 
tries giving his own money to others, that 
they may stop making money, perhaps, 
and make something they know how to 
make better, he is told that he is spoiling 
them, that he is a pauperizer, that he is 
breaking down the foundation of society. 
Society swears by the shibboleth of self- 
support. Self-support, society tells its 
inspired millionaires, is what society is for. 
Every man's hand is against him. His 
words may not be, but his hand is, and 
everything he does with his life is. Ex- 
cept in his evenings and holidays, every- 
thing he does with his life is based on the 
belief that getting-a-living is living. 

When the millionaire stops to think 
about it, he remembers that when he was 
getting his million dollars he believed that 
getting-a-living was living himself. He 
finds that the men he knows around him, 
136 



who have actually tried being millionaires, The Lack of 
believe it still, — most of them. Those for^nXnaTres 
who would like to try being millionaires 
believe it — at least they would like to 
see if they do. The result is, that the 
majority of people nowadays — (1) mil- 
lionaires who are still getting a living, (2) 
persons who are getting a living in order 
to be millionaires — may be said to consti- 
tute, so far as helping the world is con- 
cerned, the dependent and pauper classes 
of society. That is to say, they are de- 
pendent upon getting a living and society 
can expect very little from them except 
their getting a living. Any real living 
that may be done in the world will have to 
be done by other people, and, as men who 
are really living their lives themselves, are 
the only men who can help the rest of the 
world to live, all persons who are merely 
getting a living must be counted out, in 
any large and practical scheme of world- 
lifting. 

The one logical thing that is left for a 
137 



Inspired man to do who has a million dollars in his 

Millionaires i , • • j'j.* ii* i ±_ 

pocket IS to spend it m gettmg" people not 
to want it, in getting them to love their 
work instead of their wages. The most 
practical way the rich man can do this is 
to ally himself in all places and in all 
walks of life with the men who are artists. 
The great moral adventure of making a 
world which has a virile, every-day, all- 
day belief in labor and the inspiration of 
labor narrows itself down to two kinds 
of men, rich men who refuse to use their 
money merely to make more money, and 
poor men who, as anyone can see at a 
glance, do not even need to be rich — re- 
formed millionaires and artists. In gen- 
eral all persons in all employments who 
love making a perfect thing out of the 
thing they do, more than making money 
out of it, may be called artists, whether 
they are millionaires or not. In society, as 
at present constituted, under the false ma- 
chine-conditions that now obtain, the mil- 
lionaire finds the majority of men putting 
138 



their work into a time and place by itself. The Lack of 

Conveniences 
for Millionaires 



mi- • 1 J? J • j-i- • Conveniences 

Ineir sole reason lor doing their 



work is that they may have time to 
play. But he also finds hundreds 
of other men in these same machine- 
shops who have the point of view 
of the artist. They seem to have been so 
created that neither work nor play can be 
got out of them in the ordinary way. 
They mix up the words. Unless they 
can do their work perfectly enough to 
make play out of it, they do not do it. 
Their work and their play, alike, both fail 
to interest them unless they are in the act 
of putting them together. 

All persons the inspired millionaire can 
find in all walks of life who have the 
strength, daring, and joy in them to play 
in their work, to make their work self-ex- 
pressive work, whatever it costs, and for 
lesser wages if necessary, all persons who 
insist upon putting their whole selves into 
their work, who lay the emphasis of their 
joy not upon their evenings and their days 
139 



Inspired off , but upon the Very brunt and center of 
MiiUonaires ^YieiT living, — all such persons the inspired 
millionaire will seek out and gather to- 
gether. He will let his money take sides 
with their souls and he will set them in a 
large place and give them their tools and 
let them work their will upon the world. 
Then a new world will begin to be made. 



140 



II 

The Millionaire Who Does Not Want to 
be Lonely 

A MILLIONAIRE is a helpless 
man, wondering how he can possi- 
bly think before he dies, of enough beauti- 
ful, or permanent values into which he 
can put his money. An artist is a help- 
less man who is looking for enough money 
into which he can put his values, and ma- 
terialize his ideas. To be a millionaire is 
to have so much matter on one's hands 
that one cannot possibly in one short life 
have enough spirit to go around. To be 
an artist is to possess so much of the ideal 
and beautiful that one cannot get hold of 
matter enough to express it. 

It seems to make little difference, so 

far as the hardship is concerned, if one is 

to be a poor man, whether one is poor 

backwards or forwards. The millionaire 

141 



Inspired who is poor bccausc he has not time to 
Miiuonaires ^^^^^ j^^ Hioney and the artist who is 

poor because he has not time to make it, 
are the men who rule the world between 
them, and they are both paupers. 

Perhaps it is the main trouble with our 
civilization that they are both paupers, 
that matter and the spirit just at present 
are locked away by themselves, that the 
two most powerful kinds of men a civ- 
ilization can have — its rich men and its 
artists, the men who can buy and the men 
who can make — are lonely : they cannot 
seem to get together. 

The fact that they belong together, that 
men feel that they do, that they are bound 
to come together some time, is shown by 
the history of every family fortune that 
has been produced. It is the operation 
of a natural elemental law that wealth 
must ally itself with beauty or creative- 
ness of spirit, with men who dare, or melt 
away and be redistributed where it can. 

If the men who are obliged to have 
142 



great incomes in order to support life The Millionaire 

. , , , , 1 • . • 1 1 Who Does Not 

Wish to keep their great incomes, they can ^^^^^ ^.^ ^^ 
only do it by allying themselves with men Lonely 
who have great enthusiasms, and do great 
things whether they have great incomes 
or not. Men who are clever enough 
to love their work more than their 
wages are the only equals, the only fit 
men or partners, for millionaires. Inven- 
tors and artists are the only men who 
without any money can do and are doing 
every day millionaire sorts of things. 

It has seemed to me that the day is 
not far off when there shall be a turn in 
the tide of wealth in America. The 
American man of wealth is going to stop 
working grimly away on the world all 
alone and looking askance at the artist — 
who is all alone, too. He is going to 
break away from Philistinism, from a 
mere bank or safe-deposit view of life, and 
from his big comfortable clubs, and asso- 
ciate with artists and with men of genius, 
men of ideas, inventions, and visions. 
143 



Inspired Inspired millionaires, the most envied men 

Millionaires • .1 i i j • • i x* ^ 1 • 

m the world, and inspired artists and in- 
ventors, the humble inspired laborers, the 
most despised and patronized men in the 
world, are going to be inevitably thrown 
together. They have the making of the 
planet between them. As they have the 
necessary gifts of matter and spirit that 
go to the making of a planet (one that 
can be taken seriously), and as the making 
of a great, happy, peaceful, furnished 
planet is the only thing big enough for 
such men to be interested in, they can 
probably do it. 

It has been attempted in the last two 
chapters to point out the extreme diffi- 
culty of being an inspired millionaire of 
the European or imported kind, in this 
country — the gentleman of leisure and 
en j oyer of the world, who seeks to benefit 
and refine it by the way he spends his 
money and by the ennobling effect of 
his pleasures. 

It is intended in the chapters that f ol- 
144 



low to point out the opportunities of the The MlUionalre 

more typical American millionaire, we are ^^°^ ^"^^^ °^ 
now beginning to produce — the man Lonely 
who is inspired in making his money in- 
stead of in spending it. 



145 



Ill 

The Millionaire Who Wants to he Happy 

MILLIONAIRES, as seen from 
Mount Tom on an Easter morning, 
looking across the country, as a whole, 
seem to be dotted rather thickly; but 
they do not look as important — from up 
here on Mount Tom, with a big fresh sky 
over them — as they do down in North- 
ampton by one's fire-place, with The 
Springfield Republican in one's hands. 
And even there — even in a Springfield 
Republican sort of world — millionaires 
look more important for what they might 
be than for what they are. With all these 
miles of meadow down below, all so still 
and snowy, and beautiful and unconcerned 
looking, I have been wondering why I 
should bring my new unfinished miUion- 
aires up here. I have caught myself re- 
membering a line of Bliss Carman's some- 
146 



where, about being a " fidget and a re- The Millionaire 
former." One would have to be rather 



far gone to be a reformer up on Mount 
Tom to-day — with this still stretch of 
snow below one — this great floor of sun- 
shine on the world. I call people to wit- 
ness that I have not been trying to make 
a kind of fine moral flurry and improve 
people, in this book, and get millionaires 
to do right. I merely want our million- 
aires to be happy. And, so far as one 
can see, looking over the country at large, 
they do not seem to be paying the slight- 
est attention to it. The people have a 
right to have their millionaires happy. It 
is the millionaires who are running the 
world, and it is because they are not enjoy- 
ing their work that they are not running 
it better. It would be a matter of public 
concern and of personal pleasure to all of 
us to-day to see one happy millionaire — 
one real millionaire who is really enjoying 
himself, who is daily getting the taste out 
of the world, who is noticing the human 
147 



be Happy 



Inspired racc and playing with it, the way artists 

Millionaires j n • . 

do, for instance. 

I sometimes think that if — ahnost any 
afternoon, at three o'clock — one could 
look off from Mount Tom across the coun- 
try and see our millionaires, thousands of 
them, all out playing golf with our artists, 
the real ones and best ones, the best 
sculptors, painters, composers, singers, 
and writers — happy millionaires would 
begin to be seen cropping up almost every- 
where all the way between New York 
and Los Angeles. There would be more 
happy artists, too. They would catch 
each others' spirit. All that milHonaires 
need, to be happy, is to grow more like 
the artists. And what our best artists in 
this country need, is to grow more like 
millionaires. 

The problem seems to be, how to get 
them together before they are dead. 
When the millionaire dies, one finds that 
in the second generation his money is 
almost always spent by, and with, and for, 
148 



artists, and after the artists are dead they The Millionaire 

Who Wants to 

are ahnost always miUionaires. They be Happy 
keep on, some of them, like Wagner and 
Durer, making fortunes — one fortune 
after the other, out of their graves. 

While it is true that by the mere move- 
ment and stir of events in the world, 
money and the arts, as by a kind of 
huge cosmic sex-attraction, are being 
inevitably brought together, it is also true 
that they do not come together any sooner 
than they can help. When wealth and 
beauty are seen together to-day in 
America there is apt to be something a 
little dogged and helpless and dragged- 
in about it. It has the air of a last resort, 
as a rule, when the millionaires and the 
artists are seen working quietly and hope- 
fully together. 

The main difficulty that stands between 
the millionaires and the artists working 
together, without both waiting to be dead 
first, instead of being an economic diffi- 
culty, is almost purely a personal one, a 
149 



Inspired difficulty of temperament. Rich men 

Millionaires j •• ±. ixi i j_i 

and artists — each taken as a class, the 
men who can buy and the men who can 
make — will not understand each other. 

To the rest of us they are both men of 
proved power and value, men who control 
between them the two practical secrets of 
the world — the secret of being poor and 
powerful and the secret of being rich and 
powerful. But they do not respect each 
other. Because, perchance, the million- 
aire is a man who sees that money is an 
inspired thing and that inspired things 
can be done with money, and tries to get 
some, the artist feels superior; and be- 
cause the artist sees that inspired things 
can be done without money, and is doing 
them, the millionaire looks upon him as a 
kind of happy, mysterious, intolerable 
person. 

It is one of the concerns of this part of 
this book to point out a few tokens of how 
the millionaire and the artist in this coun- 
try are coming together. 

ISO 



They are going to come together be- The Millionaire 

,, ,. ,1 , .• . 1 n Who Wants to 

cause the conceptions that artists have oi ^^ Happy 
milhonaires and business men in America 
are going to change in the next fifty 
years. People have stopped putting all 
business men together into one indistin- 
guishable mass. The business man has 
appeared in America who is insisting that 
a business man is as good as anybod}^ 
He is proving that he has the same spirit, 
the same principles, and the same motive 
in his work that the artist has. 

It is still true that the men who have 
the habit of dropping into the National 
Arts Club in New York can snuggle up 
the word " art " if they want to, and with 
a certain serenity and self -congratulation, 
and they can still feel, not without some 
plausibility, that they are a httle nobler 
for being associated with the arts or with 
the professions, and a little more high- 
minded and disinterested than business 
men. But their time is limited. 



151 



IV 

The Millionaire Who Is As Good As 
Anybody 

WE HAVE a tradition or perhaps 
a kind of left-over consciousness, 
most of us who are associated with the pro- 
fessions, that we would rather not be 
grocers if it can be helped — even great 
grocers. The professions have the his- 
toric right of way and the old-world pres- 
tige on their side and they seem to have a 
higher standing in the community. The 
more distinguished preachers in New 
York, probably — the majority of them — 
do not want to change places with the 
more distinguished grocers like Park and 
Tilford. 

One of the most hopeful things that 

can be pointed out in the business world 

just now is that if Park and Tilford knew 

which the preachers were, out of the more 

152 



distinguished preachers in New York The Millionaire 

1 n 1, • . 1 • ii Who is as Good 

who felt superior to being grocers they as Anybody 
would not go to hear them preach. None 
of the best grocers would go. Some of 
the worst ones might and would not know 
the difference. But the best grocers, if 
they go to church, want something they 
can use to lift on their lives the next day. 
This is the next cloud the size of a man's 
hand. Our whole American country is full 
of business men who fail to get inspiration 
out of preachers who think that being a 
preacher is a superior or more high- 
minded enterprise than being a grocer. 
Our American communities all have men 
in them who take a professional pride in 
business. They are idealists. They 
are seeing every day how much larger 
motives and how much more generous 
understandings and how much nobler 
abilities can be used, every hour of the day 
and the night, in conducting a modern 
business. They have discovered that 
being a judge or a bishop or a physician 

IS3 



Inspired OF an editor or an author or a professor in 

Millionaires .i • * • ■ • j. -l j. 

this American country means just what a 
man puts into it and no more. So does 
being a grocer. The grocer of the better 
sort is insisting in America to-day that he 
is as good as anybody. He is deahng all 
day with the real things and with the facts, 
and he sees that in our existing moral, 
economic, and social conditions the busi- 
ness life has become the storm-center, the 
religion-center of the world, the place 
where the real religion of the people is 
being day by day wrought out and welded 
into the lives of men. There is not a 
business one can think of, which is not 
full of little temples where one can curse 
or pray. Every business one knows has 
its host of light in it, fighting against its 
host of darkness — one set of men con- 
ducting the business as if they and the 
public were engaged in a sort of mutual 
enthusiasm and daily service, and perma- 
nent success, another set of men whose 
success is ruining the business to which 

154 



they belong, and the pubHc besides — and The Millionaire 
themselves. The American business man ° *^^^ , 

as Anybody 

who has observed these things is the most 
inspiring character this country has pro- 
duced, because he is every day seeing big 
inspiring things to do. Our best business 
men are grasping at the honors and the 
motives, and at the public standing of the 
professions. They are full of victorious 
self-respect, and are proving the dignity 
and raising the standing of the business in 
which they are engaged. 

A man who is really being professional 
in the conduct of his business, who is doing 
all the while hard and unprofessional- 
looking things in a professional way, can- 
not much longer be ranked by society in 
a lower row than the man who is merely 
being a judge. A great many people 
could be a judge professionally. Being 
a judge is easier. Every business man 
knows this, and he sees that everybody else 
is going to know it soon, that society is 
going to see how difficult and how honor- 
155 



Inspired able the thing he is doing is. The man 

Millionaires i • j? • i • t_ • • • j 

who IS proiessional m business is going to 
get more prestige and standing out of it 
than the man who is merely professional 
in a profession. The honors of the world 
go to the men who foresee the next neces- 
sary, unexpected, and difficult thing to do, 
and then do it. Under our present condi- 
tions it takes more brains to be a good, 
morally-beautiful grocer than it does to 
be a good, moraUy-beautiful clergyman; 
and it is already beginning to look, in some 
quarters, as if the clergymen would have 
to hurry a little in the next generation if 
they are going to keep up to grocers and 
icemen, and coal dealers in the pews who 
are practicing what clergymen preach, 
and who illustrate their sermons for them 
during the week. It is generally the illus- 
trations that people prefer in sermons. 
The man who devotes himself to being 
a grocer professionally, for instance, who 
makes his business profitable enough to 
be permanent and at the same time creates 
156 



values and lowers prices in his city so that The Millionaire 

,i 1-1 11 •! 'l ij Ai- Who is as Good 

the whole world wishes it could come there 



and live, is going to be not only the lead- 
ing citizen in his own town, but a national 
figure. The first man who uses his power 
to dominate the markets of a great city 
and to make it the cheapest city to live in in 
the United States will be news around the 
world. His business character will be the 
leading advertisement put out by the 
Board of Trade. Factories will flock to 
the city, and great schools and great rail- 
roads and great churches. Any grocer 
in any city who will get control of its mar- 
kets and who will raise values and reduce 
prices so that people can live there a 
fourth cheaper than they can in the cities 
that compete with it, will be so big a man 
that railroads will be rebuilt for him and 
geography reconstructed for him. He 
will put out his hand and stir the center 
of population of the United States. 

When a few cities have moved over to 
where he is, and a few of the other cities 

^57 



as Anybody 



Inspired farther off, already feel that they are 
Miiuonaires gi-^p^jj^g.^ ^nd wiU have to go, the other cities 
will grow business-like enough to have a 
morally beautiful grocer or professional 
business man of their own, in self defense. 
Then, when all the cities have learned the 
lesson and America has achieved at last 
the most high-minded, most scientific, 
most efiicient grocery business that can 
be found — that is, the business in which 
values have been brought up the high- 
est and prices have been brought down 
the lowest — all the nations, and all the 
men, and all the money of the nations will 
begin pouring into America as if it were 
some vast trough at the bottom of the 
world. 

This may sound religious or poetic ; but 
it is business. 

Thousands of men who have partly be- 
lieved it and who have partly tried it, have 
been believing and trying it harder every 
year, and they have found that the more 
they succeed the more professional they 
158 



become, and that the more professional The Millionaire 

.11 ■ 1 r 1 J r •! Who is as Good 

they become the more capable and bril- ^s Anybody 
liant men they are able to draw into busi- 
ness with them. The immense propor- 
tion of university men who are going into 
business every year instead of into the 
professions — men of the highest possible 
intellectual calibre and spirit — are being 
attracted because the different forms of 
business in this country are becoming 
more professional in the powers they call 
for and the spirit they exercise than the 
older professions. The great business 
houses, or nearly all of them, are profes- 
sional in their origin, to-day. They begin 
in laboratories and in the researches of 
experts and specialists and are based upon 
secrets of chemistry and geology and 
botany, and the key to modern business 
success is getting more and more into the 
hands of inventors, and scientists, and of 
the masters of materials. 

When one stops to think of the actual 
opportunity for the spirit of the arts and 
159 



Inspired scicnces, in the development of the soil, 

Millionaires ,t • ,1 • ii ,1 

the mines, the very air up over the earth — 
when one stops to think of the supremacy 
of the inventor to-day, of the glory 
and power of the successful organizer — 
the elevation of business ideals and the 
crowding of our picked men into trade 
and commerce seems almost a matter of 
course. The big, permanent things can- 
not be done by men with small spirits or 
with small morals ; and when one considers 
how big the things are that are waiting to 
be done in this way, by the bigger type of 
business man, it makes being a lawyer 
now-a-days, or a clergyman, or an author, 
seem a comparatively plain and humble 
affair. 

This is what the professional business 
man is seeing all about him in America. 
It is what makes the American business 
man lead the world, — this kind of in- 
spired sense he has of himself, and of his 
own career, and of what can be done with 
material and homely things. We are all 
160 



beginning to guess that there is nothing The Millionaire 

. . • • 11 1 , It I ■ • Who is as erood 

intrinsically second-rate about getting as anybody 
rich. The only reason that getting rich 
has not ranked a man highly is that the 
wrong men have taken hold of it. 

The millionaire in America who obvi- 
ously belongs to the creative or artistic 
class, who conducts his business with a cer- 
tain richness of temperament, who con- 
ceals his money decently and safely in his 
personal character, so that artists and pro- 
fessional men feel that he is one of them- 
selves, will be taken seriously into the fold 
soon, by our professional men. Our best, 
our most select, and gentlemanlike, and 
remote ones will be convinced (even 
our minor poets will see it) that a business 
man can be an artist. He will convince 
them by the way he conducts his business, 
by being what may be called in a certain 
robust sense, a poet with a million dollars 
— a somewhat realer poet than we are used 
to — a man to whom a million dollars is an 
art form. 

i6i 



Inspired When a few millionaires like this have 

Millionaires ^^^^ judiciously Scattered around the 
country the breach between wealth and 
the arts, between making a fortune and 
making a book or a picture, will cease, and 
the National Arts Club will gradually set- 
tle down at last into being human and 
sociable and friendly-like with the Board 
of Trade. 



i6z 



A Million Dollars As A Profession 

THERE are three principles that a 
business man who is as good as any- 
body, who is an artist, or who ranks him- 
self with the professions, applies to his 
business : 

I. Not making all the money he can. 
II. Making money enough. 
III. Mixed motives. 
He sees to it that he is serving others 
and serving himself at the same time. He 
fails to see anything irreligious, or second- 
rate, or immoral about mixed motives, if 
they are mixed properly. He believes 
that mixed motives are the best ones to 
have, that they are the most sound, manly, 
and candid ones, and the most religious, 
and that it takes the most religion to mix 
them, and that they are the only kind that 
work. Service without self-preservation 
163 



Inspired docs not look holy to him and self -preser- 

Millionaires , . "ii • • i ^ i i • . 

vation without service does not look inter- 
esting. As long as it is really true that 
the art of making money is the mere plain 
rudimentary instinct of making as much 
as one can, it cannot be called an art. It 
does not interest, and never has, and can 
never hope to interest an artist. It does 
not amount to enough. There is nothing 
that is really original, or that is really 
capable, about making as much money as 
one can. Anyone could have thought 
of it. Nearly everybody has — who has 
conducted a business at all — since the be- 
ginning of the world. But the moment 
a man undertakes to conduct his business 
in such a way as to make it a service to the 
public, and to his employees, and a perma- 
nent profit to himself, he becomes an art- 
ist. It is the power in a man which insists 
upon putting essential things together, 
and upon keeping them together, which 
makes an artist. Almost anyone ought to 
be able to get rich, by the simple rudi- 
164 



mentary device of leaving one or two of a Miiuon 
them out. If one is willing to give up profession 
enough for it, if one is willing to be a 
great neuter personality like Mr. Rocke- 
feller, make a mere business-is-business 
device of one's self, a kind of hydraulic 
valve or pump of riches, it would be com- 
paratively easy to be rich, and would not 
take an artist. And an artist would not 
try. It would not interest him — a mere 
monotonous taking of all he could get, 
whether there was any object in it or not. 
He would not be willing to give up the 
self-indulgences of the real man of busi- 
ness — the other strands of business that a 
man enjoys — the candor and the glory, 
and the self-respect that always go with a 
great, joyous, or real success, and that 
make getting rich a little slower and more 
complicated. The element of personal 
profit, a real artist in business looks upon 
with dignity and frankness, and as a mat- 
ter of course, and he is no more willing to 
give it up than the element of workmanship 

i6s 



Inspired and public service. If he is serving others 

Millionaires i • ■ . i • • r» i 

he insists on making money, ii only as a 
bond of permanence in what he is doing. 
It is all that keeps him from being degraded 
to the rank of a mere charity worker. Any- 
body can conduct a charity and be kind 
and superficial, correcting with money the 
abuses it has wrought; but it takes an 
artist of the highest human and business 
resources to estabhsh a great industrial 
house on such profound principles of 
mutual service, and voluntary generosity, 
and self-support, that it will renew itself 
from within, and last for generations, and 
be what a great business house ought to 
be — something to be pointed to as one of 
the moral dignities of the nation, a monu- 
ment to the probity and beauty of the 
people. To be charitable, to help others 
in business in such a way as to make them 
not worth helping any more, is a small 
thing for a millionaire to do. A man with 
a few cents could do it. The special op- 
portunity of a millionaire is that, if he has 

i66 



brains and capital enough and they are a MiUion 

J . . I 1 1 • • •■• Dollars as a 

mixed together enough, he is m a position profession 
to do business on a permanent basis, to 
adopt principles, and methods, and faiths 
which make him ready to forego the large, 
foolish, swift profits so much looked for 
now — and conduct a business with quiet- 
ness and dignity and without getting out 
of breath. (It is the difference between 
breathing with the upper chest and a deep 
abdominal breathing in business that men 
are slowly beginning to realize.) 

Almost any man who goes below his 
diaphragm in anything he does is ready 
to bear witness that the idea that has lately 
taken possession of many of us that " busi- 
ness is business," and that humanity is a 
special department by itself, is contra- 
dicted by the plain matter-of-fact daily 
experience of the men who always rule at 
last. The experience of these men in 
every age of the world has been that neither 
business nor humanity can be of any per- 
manent account unless it is put with the 
167 



Inspired othcr. Not Until the business ability that 

Millionaires i ^ i- * • mt 

has made our ordinary American million- 
aire, and the human or artistic ability that 
has made the artist, are being put together 
daily in the same life — the life of our 
typical modern man of affairs — can we 
expect anything but puddling and tempo- 
rizing, either with the social, industrial sit- 
uation, or the artistic, philanthropic one. 
The business man who is heaping up social 
conditions which require him to turn phi- 
lanthropist, and the philanthropist who is 
heaping up financial conditions which re- 
quire him to turn business man, are both 
ridiculous. The very essence of sound- 
ness and permanence in a man's business 
is that the man is doing good in it as he 
goes along, and the essence of a sound 
philanthropy is that with time and capital 
it pays. 

In saying that the business man who 
ranks his business with the arts and the 
professions does it by employing three 
principles (not making too much money; 

i68 



making enough; mixed motives), it A Million 
ought not to be overlooked that the value p°ofesIion^ 
of these principles depends entirely upon 
the way in which they are carried out. 
Perhaps the best way to carry out these 
principles is to put with them three en- 
thusiasms : 

First, an enthusiasm for doing the 
thing one does perfectly (which requires 
not making too much money) . 

Second, an enthusiasm for doing the 
thing one does independently and in one's 
own way (which requires making money 
enough) . 

Third, a general enthusiasm for the 
world and for the other people who are 
allowed in it. 



169 



VI 

A Million Dollars as an Art Form 

1 

Surplus and Aristocracy/ 

THE fundamental thing in a man 
with a million dollars, if he wants to 
be an artist, is imagination. A man has 
a vision of something to do, which if done 
in the way he sees it, will be good. Then 
he does it. 

There is always something fine and 
willful and aristocratic and full of leisure 
and pleasure and surplus about a man, be 
he rich or poor, who creates a new value 
in the world. The creative imagination is 
some man's joy, his surplus of selfishness. 

The common people of Boston did not 
want music taught to them in the public 
schools, but Lowell Mason did not want 
to live in a wilderness or at best on a little 
oasis of music with a few other lonely 
170 



shivering musicians in New England, Surplus and 
and he was possessed with the idea that "^ ocracy 
every one should sing. There was almost 
no one who thought he was right and there 
was no one who would give him a chance 
to prove it, and the best he could do at 
first was to get the people of Boston to 
give him permission to pay his own salary 
while he proved to them that they wanted 
music. When the people had had it 
proved to them in Boston that they wanted 
music, it was found that they wanted it in 
every city in the United States. It would 
be hard to measure the value to this coun- 
try of the willfulness of Mr. Lowell 
Mason. There is a great chorus of shop 
girls and factory hands singing The Crea- 
tion to-day in more than one city in 
America, and the joy, or the memory or 
hope of joy, the bare idea that there is 
a great, free, overflowing world of it, is 
being kept within the hearing of the 
people. 

And what Lowell Mason did with the 
171 



Inspired common pcoplc in Boston, Major Hig- 

Millionaires • -.i i • c i it. i • 

gmson with his bymphony has been doing 
A Million with the so-called cultivated classes. They 

Dollars as an . i • i 

Art Form are not quite cultivated enough to want 
to pay for all of it themselves, as yet, but 
they are going to be, and orchestras are 
being wanted and springing up all over 
the country because a willful man in Bos- 
ton wanted people to have an orchestra 
that they did not want — a man who did 
not care to go to Europe of an evening 
after dinner when he wanted music. 
Nearly all the best things for people have 
had to be forced upon them by some man's 
overflowing selfishness, and what a democ- 
racy is for, is to create a free and favor- 
able atmosphere for producing excep- 
tional personalities, men who will do these 
things, rich and poor, men who are willful 
with visions of their own for others, and 
who give people a chance to want what 
they are glad they wanted after- 
wards. One could go on forever multi- 
plying instances of the fact that the great 
17* 



or new ideas begin in the aristo- Surplus and 
cratic spirit, in the peremptory serv- '*^ ocracy 
ice of some man who has a vision 
of his own, some one Kke PuUman 
with his sleeper, who centers himself upon 
his vision until it is everyone's. From the 
Krupp gun up to Millet and Whistler and 
Wagner's operas the principle holds good. 
We look for something assertive about all 
real values from the little things to the 
great, from the unpractical phonograph, 
the visionary railroad, from the self-asser- 
tion of coal, of steel, of Copernicus, Co- 
lumbus, Luther, up to the self-assertion of 
the New Testament, that divine, willful be- 
lieving in everybody, that standing up for 
people in spite of themselves which started 
our modern world. There seems to be 
nothing good that is not aristocratic and 
noble and free and voluntary. What 
civilization is for is to produce in every 
temperament and walk of life men with a 
surplus. The man who has a vision of his 
own that is so good that he is in danger of 
overdoing it, and even of doing wrong 
173 



Inspired with it, is the man the world can least 

Millionaires ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^ 

A Million afford to let him do wrong with it awhile 

Dollars as an . ii'iii i 

Art Form and practice on us and do right slowly and 
clumsily; and the only safe course for 
society would seem to be not to annihilate 
him or emasculate him, or smother him 
out, or flatten him into a socialist, or make 
impossible in him what one might call his 
selfishness, but to take his selfishness — 
that great, natural, driving force of things 
— and turn it on the main drive- wheel of 
the world and on the good of all of us. 

The Millionaire and His Imagination 

I have been wondering of late why it is 
that the schemes that are put forward 
in behalf of the very poor and for 
the betterment of the condition of the 
rich seem to come to so little. Neither 
the very poor nor the very rich seem to like 
their schemes, and yet the schemes look 
true, most of them, and worthy. Every- 
174 



one has a vague feeling that they ought The 

, , 1 • 1 1 ■ 1 • 1 1 Millionaire 

to be admired, and everyone thinks how andHis 
good and how charitable they are. But imagination 
they are not attractive or catching. No- 
body cares about them except the people 
who think of them, and committees. I 
have come to the conclusion that most of 
our schemes for getting miUionaires to do 
as they should, are failing to-day, not 
because the schemes are right or wrong, 
but because they are neuter. They fail 
to reckon with the creative joy of a man 
in what he has thought of himself. What 
the very poor and the very rich seem to 
be needing most in this country just now 
is not to have money given to them, or 
money taken away from them, but the 
chance to help themselves. If they could 
break away from Edwin D. Mead and 
the rest of us, and all the other dear, faith- 
ful people who worry about them, and 
plan for them, and would think of some- 
thing they would be glad to do themselves, 
things would begin to budge. If society 

175 



Inspired cvcr wishcs to start up the millionaire in 

1 lonaires ^j^^ xight direction, it will need to reach 

A Million through to the joy, the vitality, and energy 

Dollars as an mi i i i • 

Art Form m the man, to strike down through to his 
sense of power, and to stop pottering with 
his sense of propriety. 

One must not speak of anyone's con- 
science disrespectfully, but it does seem to 
be true that when the place we get hold of 
in a man is his conscience, it does not seem 
to be a very practical hold. His con- 
science, is there of course, always, but what 
of it? It is at best only a very small part 
of a man, and if our hold on a man is to be 
firm and enduring, and endure moods and 
all kinds of events and the weather of the 
world, it seems to be necessary to get hold 
of the whole man, and the only way to get 
hold of the whole man is to get hold of the 
power in him which most sums him up, 
which concentrates the whole of him in 
itself, and this means that we must 
strike down through to the creative in- 
stinct in the man, the stronghold of vital- 
176 



ity and desire. It is not going to be by The 
appealing to his sense of what he ought to and H^r^^^ 
want or by pulling peevishly on the sleeve imagination 
of his conscience or by changing his 
clothes, but by appealing to what he does 
want, by rousing the nobler passion in the 
man, the lion of dehght in him, the visions 
and the dreams, the sense of noble oppor- 
tunity, of personal destiny, of identity 
with great movements and deeds, that men 
hke millionaires are going to be made to 
do things. In other words, if a million- 
aire is to accomplish great things with his 
money, he must be allowed, hke any other 
man, to act with it like a genius or an 
artist. 

The main thing in the artist that makes 
him an artist is his creative function, and 
the main thing that seems to make a mil- 
lionaire a great millionaire, a genius or 
an artist with money, is his passion for 
thinking of things himself, and putting 
them together, his imagination or virility 
of thought. The artist is never so hard 
177 



Inspired put to it in this world that he has to look 
onaires g^j.Q^j^^ -jj j^ ^^ ^q good. He creatcs and 

AMiUion Ji^es it. After he has created (like 

Dollars as an . . -in i rr^i 

Art Form God) , he says it IS good, afterwards. The 
good is thrown in and is too obvious to be 
mentioned, with a great artist, and the 
probability seems to be that the great mil- 
lionaire, when he comes, like Leonardo da 
Vinci or Phidias, will do good in the same 
way, not by poking dismally around the 
world and being on committees, and try- 
ing to be self-sacrificing and trying 
vaguely to make people happy, but by 
being happy with some deep happiness 
himself, and overflowing the world with it. 
The real artist does not see anything to 
be ashamed of in this. He believes that 
the creative instinct, the instinct of pro- 
ducing and reproducing values, was in- 
tended in this world as a personal joy and 
that it would not be a capable, sound, or 
well-knit world if it were not. He be- 
lieves that the best use to make of a crea- 
tive joy is to have it, and that the best 
178 



way to be of service to others is to have The 
enough. He beheves that a painter who ^^^ hIs"^^ 
paints a picture merely to make other peo- imagination 
pie happy hurts their feelings, and he be- 
lieves that when a million dollars really 
appears which can be called an art- form, 
it will not be an altruistic-looking million 
dollars. It will merely be a million dol- 
lars having a good time, i. e., it will be a 
million dollars full of creative imagina- 
tion. 

When we see a man in this world having 
virtues for the fun of it, we call it the 
artistic temperament. 

The thing that makes an artist an artist 
is that he is in the daily act of using and 
enjoying his best and fullest self, and 
that except as a last resort he will have 
nothing to do with the pure or rank forms 
of unselfishness. He believes that true or 
great love consists not in unselfishness, 
but in identifying one's selfishness with 
other people's. And he is frank about 
it and acts as if it were so, no matter how 
179 



Inspired it looks. Why should not a millionaire 

Millionaires ■, n i.i I'.i 

be allowed to be an artist f 
A Million There is no reason why a true artist or 

Dollars as an 

Art Form true millionaire should be expected to feel 
a little inferior for selecting his own inter- 
ests and the interests he was born next to 
and caring for them. He believes that as 
a plain matter of fact a man who pursues 
his own interests and other people's to- 
gether and who considers that they belong 
together, is doing a more noble and diffi- 
cult as well as a more religious thing than 
the flat altruist or the merely unselfish 
man has ever dreamed of. A good, 
hearty, selfish man who is having a good, 
hearty, daily sense of identity and oneness 
with the world and is mixing himself and 
his money with it, seems more spiritual to 
an artist, in spite of appearances, than an 
altruist. Altruism, from his point of 
view, is a kind of tired, tepid, proper 
goodness. Altruists may have a better 
look at first, but what altruism is 
really made of is a sense of otherness, 

i8o 



a sense that other people are other people, The 
and that they are different from us, and and Hir"^* 
that we must do them good. The one imagination 
thing in a million dollars that can make it 
an art form is a man in it who is filling 
it with his own selfish personal desire to be 
happy. As it would be underwitted to 
try to be happy alone, he tries to have all 
his happiness, his growth, and his fortune 
so conducted that they will be full of the 
growth and happiness of others. A 
really great fortune, made by an artist, is 
a fortune that expresses a man's oneness 
with the world, his daily creative joy in 
something he and the world have had a 
great time doing together. There are 
many pleasant things that can be said of 
altruism, but altruism is never finished 
until this last fine touch of selfishness has 
been placed upon it. 

Probably if the facts were known, we 
do not any of us believe in pure unselfish- 
ness. What we really believe in is selfish- 
ness properly mixed, but we keep it as a 



Inspired little secpct of our own and we are not 

Millionaires i , i • •> . ±.i i r 

breathing it to other people because we 
A Million are afraid they would make too much use 

Dollars as an 

Art Form of it. The artist, whether he is a million- 
aire or not, is more frank than the rest of 
us, and takes his stand boldly. Being 
purely selfish or unselfish is lazy, he 
thinks. When people complain that they 
must draw the line somewhere, he answers 
that the drawing of the line is what a 
man's art or what his religion is for. It is 
what makes them interesting ; and secretly 
all the live folks in the world, whether 
they are in the sports or in the prayer- 
meetings, agree with him. Drawing the 
line and seeing it drawn straight is what 
the world likes. It has a good, 
healthy liking for selfishness. It does 
not want millionaires who are mere altru- 
ists. The world is like a woman, and 
what sensible woman wants a man about 
who is loving her for her own sake? She 
would rather be one of a man's failings, 
a happiness, a self-indulgence that he can- 



not help. It is the one thing in a husband The 
that makes her happy, and what society anVHis '^ 
really demands of a man with a million imagination 
dollars is that he should keep from being 
distant and benevolent and charitable 
with it and from improving people in- 
stead of enjoying them. The last thing 
the world can afford to do is to do any- 
thing that will keep its millionaires from 
being selfish like its artists. We want the 
artist to be selfish enough to be a good one, 
and we want the millionaire to be selfish 
enough to make the best possible use of 
being a millionaire. This may be a dan- 
gerous-looking truth, but the best way to 
know a truth is by the fine manly intelli- 
gent dangers that go with it, and by the 
way it takes for granted that the people 
are not fools. 

Money is already learning the artist's 
instinct and is learning to live, gradually, 
and to enjoy living. The time is already 
at hand when the most characteristic trait 
of money will be this living, overflowing, 
183 



Inspired neighborly creativeness. It will be found 
MiUionaires ^^g^g^^ jjj Seeing and doing the big 

A Million things that humanity has put in an order 

Dollars as an t • 'n i i ^ 

Art Form f or — ^^^ 1* Will See them SO truly and so 
nobly that it will do them and look out for 
itself besides. The man who is redeem- 
ing the business in which he is engaged, 
up to the boundary line of loss, holding 
it to the voluntary small, slow profit that 
belongs to a great, dignified business — 
the man who is making men and money 
and things together, will be a not uncom- 
mon sight. He will keep from falling 
into the three great fallacies of modern 
ambition — quick money, large money, or 
no money, and he will look upon wealth as 
the great artist looks upon art, as the 
supreme sociable institution. His mil- 
lion dollars will not be his altruism, his 
sense of being different and of doing peo- 
ple good, and it will not be his lazy un- 
selfishness and it will not be his sympathy 
or suff*ering-with, but it will be creative, 
and mutual, a great hearty joy- with 
across a world. 



He is not unaware (for thousands of The 
years the artist has not been allowed to be) f^lJ^n'Sf '^ 
that the course he has taken has the look imagination 
of selfishness. It will probably always 
be a question to some people. In the 
meantime he can only wait for cant to go 
by, and hope in his own quiet way to make 
his selfishness as effective as possible. 
The question that always interests the 
artist and the millionaire the most, is 
whether or not he is going to be a great 
artist or a great millionaire. All one has 
to do with one's selfishness, if one wants 
to be a great artist or a great millionaire, 
is to apply one's imagination to it. The 
moment a man applies his imagination to 
a selfish interest and begins to see it in 
its possible relations, a selfish interest be- 
gins to cross-fertilize and to be all 
wrought in with other people's. 

Not long ago a man who owned a fac- 
tory and had made his money to an un- 
usual degree in this spirit divided his en- 
tire fortune at his death among his 
185 



Inspired employees. He did not spoil it by being 
Millionaires jj^g^gjy conscientious and altruistic about 
A Million it. He had enjoyed thinking about it all 
Art Form his last days — the idea that he was going 
to share the rest of his money with the 
men who had helped him make it. The 
more he made this use of his money a per- 
sonal self-indulgence, the more economi- 
cal and business-like it was, and the more 
the men liked it and the more everybody 
got out of it. The best and most profit- 
able way the world can do with its million- 
aires would seem to be not to try to stop 
their selfishness and scold them for it, but 
to call out their better and nobler kinds. 

The better and nobler kind of selfish- 
ness is the selfishness with imagination in 
it. One can be selfish for one, like a baby 
with a bottle of milk, or one can be selfish 
for two, like a new lover, or one can be 
selfish for seven or eight, like a mother, 
or one can be selfish for a city like 
Jean Valjean, or one can be selfish and 
identify oneself, strike up a mutual inter- 

i86 



est, with the daily hves of eighty million imagination 
people, like Alexander Graham Bell. 



and the 
Higher 
Selfishness 



3 

Imagination and the Higher Selfishness 

The Honorable Wayne MacVeagh was 
quoted sometime ago as saying that before 
twenty years there would be but two great 
parties in this country and that by what- 
ever names they mip-ht be called, one of 
these parties would be the party of capital 
and the other would be the party of labor. 

If this statement is true, it means that 
this country has nothing in it but second- 
rate, inefficient millionaires, and second- 
rate, inefficient laborers. 

If a party that is strictly and merely a 
party of capital exists, all the second-rate 
and inefficient millionaires will belong to 
it. 

If a party that is strictly and merely a 
party of labor exists, all the second-rate 
and inefficient laborers will belong to it. 

There would soon have to be a third 
187 



Inspired party in this country, a party for million- 
MiUionaires ^.^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ sccond-ratc and ineffici- 

A Million ent, and for laborers who can work. 

Dollars as an . . 

Art Form Millionaires who propose to belong to a 
party all by themselves are inefficient be- 
cause millionaires who have no one to work 
with but other millionaires, could not get 
things done. Laborers who have no one 
but other laborers to work with could not 
get things to do. 

It is only the millionaires who do not 
want to do their work as millionaires and 
bone down to getting on with people, and 
to accomplishing things, who would want 
to belong to a party by themselves. And it 
is only laborers who are not trying to do 
their work better, and who are not trying 
to amount to something, and to be worth 
more than they get, who would think of 
belonging to a mere party of labor. 

This brings us to the question at the 
bottom of the matter. What is the basis 
of the efficiency of labor in a great indus- 
trial nation like the United States? 

i88 



The basis of the efficiency of labor, imagination 
whether it is the labor of the rich or the ^^^l^^ 

Higher 

labor of the poor, is imagination. Selfishness 

In our complex American business con- 
ditions, where so many different kinds of 
things have to be put together, men who 
are without imagination cannot be effi- 
cient. To be without imagination is un- 
business-like. Men who have no imagi- 
nation about other men's minds quarrel 
with them instead of working with them. 
They keep stopping the mills to fight. 
Men who have no imagination about other 
men's work are inefficient because they 
cannot lay out work that the men could do. 
Men who have no imagination about their 
own work and who stop imagining or see- 
ing how their work is being done, and 
how it might be done, only half do it. 
They die at forty. Men who stop imagin- 
ing or trying to keep alive in their work 
and who die at forty, and yet who keep 
on looking as if they were living, make a 
great business nation impossible. The 
189 



Inspired millionaires and laborers who are efficient 

Millionaires • , i • . ,i t_ i j. 

in this country are the men who keep put- 
A Million ting thcmselves into each other's places 

Dollars as an n i i mi • 

Art Form and making the most oi each other. Ihis 
is an act of the imagination. In the 
Bible, imagination is called the Holy 
Ghost. In literature and the fine arts it 
is called genius or perhaps the artistic 
temperament. In business it is called 
common sense, the sense of putting com- 
mon things together so that they are 
shown to be extraordinary and full of 
power and surprise. Imagination ap- 
plied to iron means steel, applied to manu- 
facturing steel it means putting a strong 
draught on the creative powers of the men 
who are helping to make the steel, and 
bringing out the utmost glow and help in 
each of them. Applied imagination — 
imagination applied to being a laborer 
and to being a millionaire are the two 
magnetic forces that run the dynamo of 
the business world. All of the best men 
are full of it. The laboring man who is 
190 



a little inspired and is creating values and imagination 
the millionaire who is a Httle inspired and ^^^^ 
is creating values are moved by the same Selfishness 
spirit. The really inspired laborer is not 
begrudging the really inspired miUionaire 
his automobile. He looks at it as it whirls 
by, thinks how the man earned it and how 
he will earn one, too. The two men at 
bottom feel that they are alike. They 
are the last men to hate each other and not 
to work together. The real enemy of the 
laborer is not the man in the automobile 
who works as hard as he can, but the 
laborer next to him who works as Httle as 
possible. The trouble with the laborers 
in our country is not that the milHonaire 
is against them, but that they are against 
each other, and that the men who cannot 
do things are in a vast conspiracy of keep- 
ing them from being done by the men who 
can. The real tragedy of labor — the 
oppression of the poor — is the mob of 
weak men intimidating the strong. The 
natural division of parties in the business , 

I9» 



Inspired world has come to be not between rich 

lUionaires ^^^ poor or cven between right and wrong 

A Million or selfish and unselfish, but between men 

Dollars as an . , ^ , 

Art Form who are creating values and men who are 
not. When they do not work together it 
is because the millionaire is a case of 
arrested development. He began by 
being an inspired laborer and has forgot- 
ten. He was once a man who was being 
inspired with something worth a million 
dollars and when his million dollars was 
paid in, he stopped. The millionaire who 
keeps as much ahead as a millionaire as he 
used to keep as an inspired laborer finds 
that his men feel identified with him or 
trust him. The more he makes being a 
millionaire look original and interesting 
and better than other millionaires have 
made it look, the more they work. It is 
the hard labor of the rich that can get the 
hard labor of the poor. A manufac- 
• turer can have all the success he wants 
who has made a success of his factory by 
being a working millionaire, by having 
Z92 



inspirations himself and by going about imagination 
in it lifting off the lid from other people's. ^^ j^^^ 
It is his putting down the lid on other Selfishness 
people's and sitting on it, that makes the 
millionaire unpopular. The moment he 
gets up and helps, they like him. They 
like him when he does not help and merely 
gets up. Our manufacturing towns are 
trying hard every day to believe a man 
can be good enqugh to be rich and they 
are even willing to stand by and let a man 
have money to throw away, if he is not 
using it to throw men away. In the last 
analysis, in a machine civilization the 
skilled labor of the rich consists in finding 
ways in factories of not throwing men 
away. 

The man who is clicking oiF the middle 
of this sentence to you, Gentle Reader, on 
the linotype machine, does not know it is 
about him probably. If it were his own 
autobiography he would not notice. 
Where is the author — which of us is 
193 



Inspired there who is trying to be an author to-day, 
MiUionaires ^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^p ^ proof -reader in 

A Million hjs mad career of correctness down the 

Dollars as an i i i . , • i 

Art Form P^gc, who could hopc to get in a word 
with him just of our own as we went by, 
or whisper to him as a brother, so that we 
two might stop a second perhaps, and be 
glad together? We are filed away in 
machines and partitioned off in specialties. 
We live hours every day, most of us, in the 
hold of the world, or under water in 
work, and we are not free and strong and 
human, and up in the light with it. And 
what I am hoping for in this book is not 
that we should all elbow our way together 
into the Pilot House all the time, or walk 
superior up above and to and fro on the 
Bridge of Things, but that we should all 
have turns of looking from the pilot's 
window at the course of the ship, and 
turns of walking up and down the deck 
in the broad day, and in the solemn night. 
Then we would go down again and with 
the seas and with the stars around us we 
would do our work. 

194 



A man who does a part of a thing can imagination 



not do it as well or as lon^, unless he has 
at times the vision of the others and gf the 
whole. A millionaire becomes no better 
than a mere factory-hand without this, 
and a factory-hand becomes no better 
than a mere millionaire. What seems to 
be wanted in the men who conduct our in- 
dustries is not altruism, but a more com- 
prehending, comprehensive, inclusive self- 
ishness — the selfishness that includes 
others and is full of shrewd mutualness 
and of a passion for putting one's own 
interests and the interests of others 
together. 

4 
Imagination and Monopoly 

It has been said that the quality that 
makes a million dollars an art- form is 
imagination. The imagination, when it is 
seen working in full force in a millionaire, 
works through into three phases: 

Invention. It makes him see some- 
thing people ought to want. 
195 



and 
Monopoly 



Inspired Mutualncss. It makcs him see men 

Millionaires ■•i j.ij.i- j. •it 

creatively, so that he can get men to help 
A Million jjjjn make it. It makes him see men cre- 

DoUars as an , 

Art Form ativcly, SO that he can get men to want it 
and huy it. 

Monopoly. It makes him see, like any 
other artist, that if the thing he has 
thought of is to be made perfectly, and 
if it is to be of the most perfect service to 
the people for whom he has thought of it, 
it must be kept in his own hands or where 
he can see that his original design is car- 
ried out. 

Mr. Edison has announced that his new 
invention, which will make it possible for 
any workman to have a new concrete 
house complete, costing only a thousand 
dollars, is a sheer gift to the world and is 
not to be patented. Anybody can make 
use of it. Mr. Edison's idea has been 
that he will be benevolent and not make 
money out of his invention himself. 

If Mr. Edison were persuaded not to 
be benevolent, or'^rather benevolent-look- 
196 



ing, in this matter, and would consent to imagination 
keep his invention of a house for nothing, Monopoly 
in his own hands, he would have the chance 
to make the most original gift to the 
world, the world has ever had — a great, 
new and free-born industry. As it is the 
world is going to have, apparently, from 
perhaps its greatest inventive genius, one 
more industry as brutal and as helpless 
and as monotonous as the rest. As some 
of us see it, it is a thoughtless thing to do 
to stand up kindly in a country and dis- 
tribute several million dollars a year with 
one's eyes shut. Mr. Edison is standing 
ing in his house at his desk by an 
open window, a bushel-basketful of 
fortunes at his right hand, and he 
is absent-mindedly tossing them — big 
handf uls of them — out through the win- 
dow to people. He has selected the peo- 
ple who happen to be going by for for- 
tunes, and among all these the bullies and 
the boys who can pound the hardest, or 
grab the quickest, are the ones he has 
selected the fortunes for first. 
197 



Inspired If Mr. Edison could be prevailed upon 

to look more selfish for the time being and 

A MiUion jf jjg would keep his idea of a thousand- 
Dollars as an 
Art Form doUar concrete house in his own hands, the 

laborers who help to make the houses could 
be paid more and treated better than any 
other class of laborers working on any 
other invention in the world. All the men 
in the industry would be pulling up in- 
stead of pulling down on the other indus- 
tries of the world. Mr. Edison's whole 
industry, with its millions of men in it, 
could be conducted from the bottom to the 
top by a great, free, self-respecting, self- 
controlled man. Mr. Edison, or his trus- 
tee, would be in a position to conduct a 
great business without fear or favor, with- 
out whining, and without explaining, as 
most of us have to do, that he wanted to 
do right in business — had always wanted 
to, but nobody would let him. He would 
not have to explain that he wanted to em- 
ploy better foremen — foremen who had 
natural gifts and who could exploit and 
198 



make the most of men — that he had imagination 
wanted to employ a higher type of super- Monopoly 
intendents, and that he had wanted to be 
a gentleman and an artist and do as he 
liked, and carry out his own idea and con- 
duct a great, dignified business, — but 
nobody would let him. He would not be 
feeling it every time he went down to the 
office like a threat held over him day after 
day, that what he did in his business was 
not being determined by the fact that he 
wanted it, but by the fact that there hap- 
pened to be in the world men who would 
do meaner things than he would. 

When Phidias was doing the Athena 
on the Parthenon, if a committee from the 
Legislature had waited on him and inter- 
rupted him and said they wanted to use his 
chisel a while, a few of them, or that 
they had found someone who could do an 
Athena cheaper, and who had underbid 
him, Phidias would have insisted that he 
had a great conception for Athens and 
that no other man had conceived it and 
199 



Inspired that no othcr man could carry it out, and 

onaires ^^^ probabilities are that, being the man 

A Million jje was, he would have been able to make 

Dollars as an 

Art Form pCOplc belieVC it. 

The moment the millionaire applies his 
imagination to the perfection of service 
and tries to give it unity and harmony aijd 
validity, monopoly follows. The moment 
he seeks to carry out an original or crea- 
tive idea, to protect his employees and to 
protect the public in it, he finds he must 
keep things in his own hands and carry 
out his own design like any other artist. 
This seems to be the first reason for mo- 
nopoly. The millionaire wants it. 

The second reason for monopoly is that 
society wants it. The moment the world 
begins to apply its imagination to getting 
what it wants out of its millionaires, it dis- 
covers that it is much easier to get what it 
wants out of a monopoly, that is, out of 
one self-controlled millionaire, or group 
of millionaires, than it is to get what it 
wants out of crowds of millionaires whd 



none of them do as they like. Men who imagination 
cannot do as they like are not responsible Monopoly 
and cannot be blamed and cannot be 
praised. One of the next things this 
country is going to do is to put its mil- 
lionaires where they can be all done up 
compactly and dealt with conveniently as 
monopolists, and can be praised and 
blamed and held responsible. 

The third reason for monopoly is that 
when the imagination is applied to con- 
ducting the business of a great country, 
it is only by monopoly, by strong million- 
aires who can do as they like, that socialism 
can be dealt with. The millionaires are 
the men who are going to put socialism in 
a sieve, and have all that is true and good 
in it sifted out before the people and used 
for them, and all that is bad in it or that 
came from machine-made men or from 
dull, discouraged factory minds cast out 
forever upon the scrap heap of the world. 



Inspired 5 

Millionaires ^^^ Bock-fire of Socialism 

A Million What scems to be good in socialism is 

Dollars as an ^ 

Art Form its Spirit, the idea that every man must be 
thought of and represented; and what 
seems to be bad in it is the letter, the idea 
that all these crowds of men must do these 
things themselves, for themselves, and 
that unless a man in this country repre- 
sents his own point of view himself, no 
one will do it. 

If there should ever come to be a time 
when there is nobody to represent a man 
but himself, in this country, we will have to 
fall back upon socialism in the letter. In 
the meantime our unpredatory millionaires, 
or millionaires of the first class, the ones 
who have thought of things and created 
values and who have not merely grabbed 
or crowded, are all of them men who have 
become millionaires by taking other peo- 
ple's points of view, and they are able to 
keep on being millionaires because they 
know what millions of people want and 



what millions of people think. If one The 
were to go through the nation and pick of Socialism 
out the men who had the greatest power 
of seeing things in a large way and from 
everybody's point of view, and of doing 
something about it, a large proportion of 
them would be found to be the men who 
are managing and moving around the 
money on the world. We have given over 
the power into their hands because they 
have known how to put more men's inter- 
ests together than we do. They may be 
selfish. So are we. One can look about 
almost any day and see a selfish man. 
One man is selfish his own size. Another 
man is selfish town-size, another nation- 
size, and now and then there is a man 
who braids in his desires with the people 
of all nations, who reaches around a world 
and grapples with all of it. If he will 
hold it steady for the rest of us, we may 
count ourselves happy. The socialists, 
who are largely men who have time to 
think only of themselves, would make 

ao3 



Inspired poop work of it. Fop that matter, 

Millionaires . n ■, . • i' ±. j.j. i •. 

II what sociahsts want to do is to 
A Million bring sociahsm to pass, the best thing 

Dollars as an 

Art Form they could do would be to pick out mil- 
honaires and get them to do it for them. 
It is the milHonaires who understand 
sociahsm. They have worked through to 
more of the truth in it, and they have more 
of an idea of how to handle it, than other 
people, and of how to make the truth work. 
It was by divining society, by practicing 
the spirit of socialism, and by making the 
truth work, that the best of them have suc- 
ceeded as well as they have, and it is by 
starting a back fire of socialism among 
our millionaires that all that is bad in 
socialism is going to be headed off and 
that all that is good in it is going to be 
set to work. Our next great million- 
aires are going to take the things that 
the socialists are saying about them and 
say them better. They can when they 
want to. More people will listen to them 
and they can do things as well as talk 
204 



about them. The trouble with socialists The 

Back-fire 



is that nearly everybody is being a socialist 
for somebody else. Socialism has always 
been something that someone else ought 
to do and the millionaires are men who are 
in a position to do their socialism them- 
selves. Every millionaire his own social- 
ist is the next motto and the next pro- 
gram of the world. 

As a threat and as a last resort — and 
as temporary scaifolding — it would be 
hard to overlook the value of the popu- 
lar socialism. But in the long run our peo- 
ple are not going to want socialism in this 
country, because monopolists can be bet- 
ter socialists for them than they can. This 
is the first reason why the people are going 
to prefer the socialized millionaire — a 
million dollars as an art- form — to social- 
ism. 

The second reason why the people are 
going to prefer a million dollars as an art- 
form — the socialized millionaire — to 
socialism, is that as compared with a social- 
ized millionaire, socialism is undemocratic. 
S05 



of Socialism 



Inspired Eighty million people do not want to do 
MiUionaires ^^ ^^ everything themselves. We want 
A MiUion to be free in a democracy and trust people. 

Dollars as an i i i i 

Art Form We Want to DC led by men who are on the 
lookout farther ahead for the rest of us, 
and who have to be. We do not want to 
take time ourselves to be always climbing 
up to the Senate. We do not even want 
to watch it, and the last thing we would 
enjoy as live, busy people, would 
be standing there on the height or on the 
look-off day after day, seeing for 
everybody. We have our own special 
things to do that we like to do 
best, and what a democracy is for is to 
let us do them. A democracy is supposed 
to be a contrivance for having every man 
represented — ^ millions of small men 
sunmied up in a few convenient big ones. 
Masses not only cannot do things, but they 
do not want to, and it is only through men 
who sum up masses and who represent 
them that a great nation can hope to 
achieve great things in the world. To 

zo6 



deny millionaires in America is to deny More 
America. The only fair question about and More°° 
a millionaire in America is " Is he really Monopoly 
an American? Is he handling the money 
that is in his hands and that has been 
placed there by natural selection as the 
trustee for all of us, or will we have to 
step in and meddle with him and insist and 
quarrel with him and represent ourselves?" 
The American democracy had always been 
supposed to be, before this, a great democ- 
racy, not a little, inconvenient one like 
Athens, where every man had to do and 
know everything; but a really great 
democracy, a country where every man 
feels that he has been left free to develop 
himself, to make the most of his own 
bent in the world, a country where it is 
safe for a man to mind his own business. 

6 

Mare Imagination and More Monopoly 

Another reason why the people are go- 
ing to work things out into monopoly, is 

207 



Inspired that if a millionaire is a monopolist, or is 
Millionaires ^^^ .^ ^ position whcre he can do wrong, 
A Million doing right is going to be made some ob- 

DoUars as an . ^ . . , , 

Art Form j^ct to him. It means somethmg and be- 
comes a self -expressive act. People all 
know him through it. He has the pleas- 
ure of being received as a comrade, a big 
brother of the world. If he is driven to 
doing right he does not mean anything 
by it, and a man who does not mean what 
he does, does not do it well. One of the 
next things we are going to discover in 
America is that we must drop our 
national, bullying attitude and quiet down 
a little with our millionaires. We must 
stop making our millionaires do right. 
We will merely spoil them. They must 
make themselves do it. Then it will 
mount up and will come to something. 
Millionaires are like other people, and peo- 
ple who are made to do a thing, do as little 
of it as possible. It is only the second- 
rate millionaires who can be driven and 
they will only do the second-rate, the mor- 

zo8 



ally-economical, sorts of things. People More 

1 J J i J.T-* 1 J. Imaeination 

who do second-rate things are almost andMore 
always people who are trying to do things Monopoly 
from the outside, because they feel driven 
to it. We are making it to-day very 
difficult for millionaires to be good. 
Nine times out of ten that people say any- 
thing about a millionaire, it is about 
things he ought not to do. Millionaires 
are naturally not inspired by a program 
of things they ought not to do. We 
could not do anything ourselves, most of 
us, with a list of things not to do, except to 
pick out those we do not want to not-do 
the most and not-do those. The trouble 
seems to be that in dealing with our mil- 
lionaires we do not treat them as if they 
were human beings. Why not let our 
millionaires be selfish like other people, 
and human? Why not see to it that their 
selfishness is allowed to develop, that is, 
have more imagination in it and include 
the rest of us? 

Uncle Joe Cannon, in the days before 
209 



Inspired he was made speaker of the House, was 

1 lonaires Q^pg^^^j indirectly a bribe of two hundred 

A Million and fifty thousand dollars and when he 

Dollars as an iiii ti i-i 

Art Form was asked why he did not take it, he re- 
pHed that he would not have been com- 
fortable. He did not like the idea of hav- 
ing to spend all the rest of his life, he said, 
with a thief. He did not take any credit 
for having done the right thing and the 
only real credit in it was that the right 
thing was comfortable to him. Possibly 
something of this sort is going to take 
place with our millionaires. They are 
going to be right because they like it bet- 
ter. The righteous man is covetous for 
the right. The sincere man is greedy for 
sincerity ; he wants all he can get both for 
himself and for others, and the man who 
is an artist with a million dollars, who 
makes it an art- form both in making it 
and spending it, has as his supreme self- 
indulgence his passion for identity or for 
mutual selfishness with the world, his pas- 
sion not for accumulating, but for inter- 



weaving his interests with the interests of More 
others. He Hkes to think that he is mak- ^'"fg'"*^''" 

and More 

ing his mind and his money a part of the Monopoly 
fate of nations, that he is making his mind 
and his money hke the rivers and the 
mountains, a part of the furnishings of the 
earth, a part of the working, every-day 
equipment of a planet. And we hke to 
have him think so. We hke to have him 
hving up to it. There is no more organic 
daily need in the hearts of men in this 
world to-day, than to have men in it that 
they know are greater than they are, and 
that they would like to be like. Men who 
see the wider and deeper forces about 
them, who daily handle them with their 
hands, men who lift up railroads and mow 
down mountains, men who give nations 
things to do, and pile their minds up in 
glass and steel against the sky, and who 
build streets under the sea, and who swing 
the cities in their orbits — these men may 
not be perfect, they may not be arch- 
angels in all the details, but they serve a 



Inspired daily need of the human race and bring 
1 lonaires ^^ ^jj ^^ ^^ ^^^^ touch of wonder or even 

A MiUion of worship in our thoughts which makes 
Art Form US proud of the world while we work, and 
which fills us with a kind of patriotism for 
the human race and for what men can 
do on a planet like this, and what they can 
be on it, and for what we shall do and be 
ourselves. 

It is all a mistake to suppose that the 
average man's special inspiration and joy 
consists in standing up for the average 
man. And it is a mistake to suppose that 
he has any special inspiration for being 
one. The only thing that is really 
inspiring to the average man to-day 
is having something above him that 
needs his best, that expects him to 
be better than he is, and that keeps 
him from being an average man any 
longer than can be helped. Except when 
he is under temporary illusion or violence, 
the average man for whom socialism has 
been invented resents equality or levelness 
with all his heart. A level and a fair 



chance for all men, not to be equal, is what More 

1 11 . Imagination 

he really wants. and More 

When he goes out to walk in Hyde Monopoly 
Park or on Riverside Drive and sees the 
miles of beautiful horses, it is a part of the 
beauty and the pleasure of it all to him 
that society has supplied these particular 
people with horses and with carriages, be- 
cause they have done more things for the 
world, that the world wanted, than the 
other people have done. Except under 
temporary conditions and when looked at 
in the large, a great house on the avenue 
is a receipt from society for value re- 
ceived. The temporary disgrace of 
wealth lies not in the wealth but in its 
diseases. Inasmuch as some men we 
know, are rich, the world must have wanted 
the wrong things or wanted them in the 
wrong way. But as fast as society is be- 
ginning to want the right things and want 
them in the right way, a man's horse or 
carriage in the Park is going to be looked 
upon like a lordship or a decoration. It 
213 



Inspired wiU be like being given the freedom of a 

Millionaires •■ a ' i, j 

City. A man s horse and carriage is a 
A Million special understanding with the people 

Dollars as an t t • -t • a ^ -i i t 

Art Form around him and with the world, that, con- 
sidering all he has done in it, he need not 
walk. 

The general effect of a thousand horses 
and carriages in the Park on a good work- 
man is to make him work. Looked at 
in any large or fair way, the presence of 
great minds in the world makes men 
thoughtful, and the presence of great for- 
tunes makes them rich. The earth is full 
of din and of thought and smoke and of 
men making things, and the great fortunes 
throughout the country are the draught 
that glow up society all through, and that 
keep every inch of it alive, moving, shap- 
ing, and welding the things that shall be. 
Millionaires are the bellows of great cities, 
the draught on the creative forces and the 
latent energies of men. 

Millionaires are the tall chimneys on the 
world. 

214 



Everything that a true or socialized More 
millionaire does becomes the common in- alTdMore"'" 
spiration of all of us. If a millionaire is Monopoly 
really an artist, if he has shown it by mak- 
ing the men and the materials around him 
glow more than other men could, no one 
will find fault with him very long for be- 
ing a monopolist. He will be regarded 
as having been appointed to the position 
by a fair, free-for-all natural selection, 
by the men who work with him. He has 
turned out to be the artist who has com- 
bined and freed them all and expressed 
them and made them come to themselves. 
When we have more millionaires like this, 
men who have proved themselves artists, 
who hold their wealth as trustees of soci- 
ety, we will stop thinking of sociaHsm, or 
of groping for the leaders of the world 
in ballot boxes. The man who handles 
his riches in such a way that if he were to 
insist upon giving them up people would 
insist upon his taking them back, leaves 
socialism or groping in ballot boxes noth- 

215 



Inspired lug to do. If a man's million dollars has 

Millionaires • • .• • •■ i f<- jj 

imagination m it and say we care- 
A MiUion fully, he can be rich. If his million dol- 

Dollarsasan . .... 

Art Form l^rs has cnough imagmation m it to say 
'^^ we " voluntarily and spontaneously, 
he can be a monopoHst, and the more of a 
monopolist he is the more people like it. 

7 
Millionaires Who Invent People 

There are several kinds of men with 
imagination in business. 

Those who invent trade-conveniences 
and economies, the creative merchants, 
brokers, storekeepers. 

Those who invent machines and whose 
imaginations play in the laws of physics. 

Those who invent new materials and 
whose imaginations play around the things 
that come out of the earth, the men who 
make new combinations of the elements, 
who are poets in chemistry, or botany and 
mineralogy. 

Those who invent people. 
216 



Men whose imaginations belong to Millionaires 

,1 n j'.fl? J.1 !■ Who Invent 

these I our diiierent classes are apt to con- pe^pig 
fine themselves merely to one of them. 
Edison has little imagination about men 
who are entangled in industrial wrongs. 
His imagination plays about electricity 
and not about the men who work with it. 
Alexander Graham Bell had very Httle 
imagination with regard to making men 
see that they wanted telephones. Thoreau 
made the best lead pencil in the United 
States, but his imagination came to a full 
stop. He did not care about seUing it. 
The special need in the industrial world 
for the inspired millionaire is that he is 
the man who puts all the other men's 
imaginations together. He has creative 
power in getting, holding, and discovering 
for the things that these men invent, the 
people who can finish theiji for them, 
and who can give them their real value in 
the world. The special function of the in- 
spired millionaire as he looks over the 
field of invention, is inventing people. 



Inspired People are the most necessary of the 

Millionaires • ,. rnu i j ±.1 

inventions, ihey make and use the 
A Million others. 

Dollars as an 

Art Form Nearly all our great milhonaires were 
invented by some other millionaire who 
saw what was in them and saw how it 
could be combined and released and put 
in action. We look to our millionaires in 
each generation to invent our new ones. 
Carnegie and Marshall Field and hun- 
dreds of others succeeded largely by dis- 
covering and inventing men to be rich 
with them, men who could be fellow-mil- 
lionaires and partners in creating the great 
values of the world. 

For every single thing that a creative 
millionaire thinks and does, he sees ten 
things he might do, ten fortunes that he 
might make, if he could invent or discover 
ten more people to have them. Some- 
times it seems as if there were getting to 
be but one really serious, industrial prob- 
lem in America, and that is the inefficiency 
of labor. Thousands of new and un- 
218 



precedented positions in this country, Millionaires 
worth from ten thousand to a hundred peopie°^^° 
thousand a year, are vacant because men 
cannot be found to fill them. The man 
who can earn a hundred thousand a year, 
that is, who can do a hundred thousand 
dollars' worth of labor, who can literally 
save all the men of the world, poor and 
rich, many times that sum by the way he 
fills his position, and by the things he 
thinks of in it and is creative enough to 
carry through — is almost impossible to 
find. Most of the men who apply for 
such positions have not the efficiency or 
imagination to fill them and over- 
flow them and make not only themselves 
but their positions a new thing in the 
world. The creative millionaire is hedged 
in on every side either by the inefficiency 
of labor among the rich or the inefficiency 
of labor among the poor. He has things 
for people to do and he wants men at four 
dollars a day, forty dollars a day, or four 
hundred dollars a day, and he cannot find 
Z19 



Inspired men who seem to be interested in the 
Millionaires ^j^.^^^ enough to do them. He can only 
A Million find men who are interested in the four 

Dollars as an in in i-i n 

Art Form dollars, or the forty dollars, or the lour 
hundred dollars a day. Nine men out of 
ten in the factories are not interested in 
working. They are working as little as 
possible for their money. They do not 
seem to be interested hour by hour, or day 
by day, as they work, in creating values. 
They are merely interested in getting all 
the values they can that other people 
have created. We are seeing the whole 
population of America honeycombed with 
labor unions or vast organizations for 
higher wages, conspiracies of poor men 
for not working so hard, and for intimi- 
dating men who want to work harder, and 
we are seeing it honeycombed with trusts, 
vast organizations of rich men for higher 
wages, for not working so hard and for 
intimidating the creative millionaires who 
want to work harder. 

There is but one explanation for the up- 



rising against labor in this country among Millionaires 
the very rich and the very poor, and for the pg^pig ^ 
general inefficiency of labor which con- 
fronts the creative millionaire and the cre- 
ative foreman or manager at every point 
to-day, and that seems to be that for the 
first time in the history of the world, the 
experiment has been tried of having two 
or three almost complete generations of 
men who have lived their lives with ma- 
chines and who have given up having » 
souls, but who have not given up having 
children. Children that have been begot- 
ten and conceived in weariness and dull- 
ness, that have been born and brought up 
in factories, and with factory fathers and 
factory mothers, who have received their 
education from mechanical school-teach- 
ers and who have received their religion 
from mechanical churches, do not furnish 
a population from which the national sup- 
ply of men who earn four hundred dollars 
a day (in creating opportunities for 
others) can be replenished. The men who 



Inspired can Cam two dollars a day and who want 

Millionaires n ,, ,•, . ti i 

tour are the ones we are the most hkely 
A Million ^q succeed in getting, or who earn 

Dollars as an 

Art Form twenty and want forty, or who are 
millionaires and do not work, and 
who merely do what other millionaires 
would do and are mere mechanics with 
money. So we are brought inevitably to 
the special function of the creative mil- 
lionaire in a world of machines, namely, 
inventing people and discovering and res- 
cuing those who are already partly in- 
vented, and who merely need to be put in 
place. The inventor-class in a factory is 
the most difficult and important class not 
to throw away. Men who are creative in 
the arts or in literature are assertive and 
can be depended on not to let themselves 
be thrown away, but if a man has it in him 
to take two hundred thousand locomotives 
off the tracks of the world and quietly put 
in electric motors instead, the chances are 
half and half that he could be headed off 
as well as not by a stupid foreman, while 



in the making, or by a year in the factory. MiUionaires 
If anyone could go through the factories ^^° invent 

People 

of the world and in some secret way could 
compile a list of the inventors the factories 
have wasted — the men who might have 
been — a large grim Who's Who — a 
book of silence and darkness, it would be 
a thicker book than the big, red, happy, 
complacent one we know so well. In- 
ventive men are apt to be dreamers and 
they are given to being disinterested and 
to not defending themselves, and they are 
whimsical and reckless, and if the at- 
mosphere in a factory is unfavorable to 
thinking of things they get over it. The 
men who have a way of thinking of 
things, too, are apt to be inconvenient and 
queer. They come generally in odd sizes. 
They have edges. The whole tendency 
of the foremen and the managers is to file 
the creative men down, and practically 
throw them away. The study of how not 
to do this is what makes a great factory 
a work of imagination and an art- form. 
223 



Inspired A million dollars is an art-form in pro- 

MiUionaires pQ^tiQ^ ^q ^Jjc number of men who have 

A Million been created and expressed in it. A mil- 

DoUarsasan . i i i i ,• . 

Art Form lionaire can be looked upon as an artist 
when he has discovered a million dollars' 
worth of men and the things the men have 
thought of, and has put the men and the 
things upon the markets of the world. 
We will all want him to be a millionaire if 
he will do that. We will all look upon 
him as appointed to the position by a fair, 
free-for-all natural selection if he has the 
power of daily making the men around 
him more valuable than they could make 
themselves, or than any of the>.rest of us 
could make them. 

It will be conceded by all of us and by 
all classes of men that the business of 
being a millionaire, the skilled labor of a 
rich man like this, is an art. It will 
almost seem to us sometimes — in the 
cases of certain priceless men that have 
been invented — like a religion. And yet 
all the time that it is a religion and all the 
224 



time that it is an art, and full of genius Miiuonaires 
and imagination, it will be seen that the ^^'1^°''^"* 
most business-like, the most matter-of- 
fact, sensible, and economical occupation 
in which a great manufacturer can be en- 
gaged is the business of inventing people, 
of human horticulture, the cross-fertiliz- 
ing, in his great buildings of machines, of 
machines and men. It does not follow 
that every shop-room, as one goes through 
should seem to be filled with sprouting 
geniuses, — but one would expect in every 
shop-room the atmosphere, the climate of 
experiment, and over in one corner at 
least there ought to be a cucumber- frame 
for ideas. Every shop-room and the 
whole factory as one goes by and looks up 
at the rows of the shining windows should 
be looked upon as a nursery of inventions, 
a great hothouse of brains. 

If this becomes true — if it becomes 
true in one single case — there will be no 
one to say then that making a miUion dol- 
lars with machines and men is not an art- 
225 



Inspired f orm, and that a great work of the imagi- 

Millionaires ■ • i • i, i j. j.i 

nation has not been wrought upon the 
AMiiUon world. A fortuue carefully and nobly 

Dollars as an i • i • -n i i i i 

Art Form wrought in this Way Will be looked upon 
like a great work of artj like Wagner's 
Parsifal, Raphael's Madonna, Beetho- 
ven's Ninth Symphony, Millet's Glean- 
ers, Marconi's Telegraph, and Cologne 
Cathedral, as an act of commudion, a 
great, mutual, self-revelation between a 
man and a world. 

Some one is going to loom up in 
America and do a factory yet that will 
rank with Shakespeare's Hamlet, Homer's 
Iliad, and the Sixtieth Chapter of Isaiah. 
Some man who is creative with money, a 
Leonardo da Vinci with dollars, will yet 
prove that a business man can be as good 
as an artist, that, like the artist, he can 
sketch in the colors of a new world around 
us — if he wants to, and do some great mas- 
terpiece of expectation upon the human 
heart. He will prove that the inspired 
and noble conceptions of a man are quite 

2Z6 



as entitled to glory and to immortality in MiiUonaires 

the world, and are quite as artistic when peo°ie°^*°*^ 

done in dollars as they are when they are 

done in tube-paints, lace-needles, chisels, 

wind in a pipe, or catgut, or words out of 

a dictionary. The factory that this man 

will do will touch us like a religion or a 

great work of art. It will not need to 

have great columns in front of it to seem 

beautiful to us, and it will not need to have 

Gothic windows to seem like a church, and 

it will be filled all day long, as we go by, 

with the whirl of the wheels in it, and the 

whirl of the wheels shall be as the chant of 

a great people. 

I have seen their hope and their strug- 
gle. I have seen that the picture of this 
factory when it comes — this first master- 
piece by a millionaire — will be put forth 
as the chart or as the ground-plan of the 
future. It shall be looked upon as the 
challenge of civilization. It shall be 
tacked by a Martin Luther on the door of 
the world. 



227 



VII 

How Some Money Looks 

THERE is reason to believe that this 
is coming to pass, the millionaire to 
whom a million dollars is an art form, 
because the typical American millionaire 
is no longer satisfied with plain, ordinary, 
humdrmn covetousness. The more obvi- 
ous rich man, the kind anybody could be if 
he tried, feels ill at ease in America to-day. 
He does not need to be driven to doing bet- 
ter. He wants to and he is trying to see 
how he can. He sees that there is some- 
thing about plain, humdrum covetousness 
which, no matter how it refines and adorns 
itself in a man's life, keeps him uncom- 
fortable about himself. What is the pos- 
sible object of having great wealth when 
all that one can think of for it, is that it is 
a device for being dissatisfied in very large 
figures instead of very small ones? There 

228 



is always something more some other man How Some 

, TT • J.1 • 1 T- j.i Money Looks 

can get. How is the rich man any better 
than the most dependent poor man if he 
is dependent to the last upon a mere rudi- 
mentary stilted love of having things and 
having to handle and own them in order to 
love them ? He looks about the world 
and he sees all the other millionaires so 
monotonous and cheap and uninteresting 

— these great mobs of them, all alike, say- 
ing the same great platitudes with money 

— of houses and lands. He is merely one 
more, and he finds it is not as interesting 
or as filling — being a millionaire — as 
one would have thought. This is the 
first reason why the typical American 
milHonaire, the one with the mere, hum- 
drum covetousness, is going to be nearer 
to what he ought to be. He is seeing 
through himself. 

The second reason for being hopeful 
about him is that if the every-day, hum- 
drum millionaire does not do his own see- 
ing-through for himself, there are people 
229 



Inspired in this country who are going to see that 

Millionaires -, -, ^ •• n i • 

somebody does it lor mm. 

Taking them as a class, it is to be ad- 
mitted that mere miUionaires, while they 
may be heady and much given to their 
own way at times, in the long run are like 
other human beings and care what people 
think. Before they die they notice peo- 
ple. It is but natural and human that 
having slaved away and given up so many 
things for a million dollars, a man should 
want a million dollars to be becoming to 
him. He wants people to feel that he is 
better off than he was before. If there 
were any way in which, after he has swept 
in his million dollars, he could go about 
and pay people so much apiece for believ- 
ing that he liked it, he would spend it, or 
nearly all of it, sometimes, on people's 
thoughts. The moment a man discovers 
that his money in our modern society is 
displaying him to disadvantage, or is ex- 
posing him to social ostracism, or to the ill- 
will of his f ellowmen, he is bound to con- 
230 



duct his fortune differently. This is a pro- How Some 
cess that is going on about us now all °"^^ 
through the United States. It is the next 
cloud the size of a man's hand. The mere 
millionaire is thinking how he looks. He 
falls to comparing himself with the other 
millionaires. He finds that many of them 
have more prestige than he, that people 
seem to be interested in some millionaires 
for themselves. They seem to be the men 
who have not lost track of the human qual- 
ities in their money — its visions, its dar- 
ing and self-control, its chivalry, its big, 
earlier, joyous, wise faiths, its wagers and 
risks, its spirit of prophecy and adventure, 
and when all these things, the things 
that the money is really for, are 
gone out of it and the man is left, at last, 
a great, still, helpless mummy of riches, 
he finds that a mere millionaire is a nobody 
and that everybody is bored by him. Ex- 
cept with his check-book in his hand who 
cares to speak to him? 

And even his money is not really inter- 
231 



Inspired cstiiig. Not a siiigle faith or belief in it, 
I lonaires gQjjjg^jjQgg "jijig qj^q singlc interesting 

thing he can think of about his money, 
when he sits down to think it over, is that 
there is sure to be more of it. And that 
does not interest a really intelligent man 
more than a minute. The subject is ex- 
hausted. He falls to thinking of ways of 
being agreeable and of having things to 
talk about with other men. He wonders 
vaguely about many of the men he sees 
about him, some of them rich and some 
of them poor, that people seem to regard 
highly, men it is some object to know 
and to be seen with in the world, the men 
who are giving great lifts on it, who are 
really doing things, and suddenly it is as 
if he fell over a great precipice in himself. 
He finds he is wondering where he is, and 
who he was and who he thought he was, 
when he is thrown with such men. There 
seems to be nothing he can do with a man 
who belongs in this class that will interest 
him. All he can do with such a man, when 
232 



he does not notice him enough, is to step How Some 

. 1 • J t' T\' J 1 X Money Looks 

up to him and say : Did you know I was ^ 
worth forty million dollars? Like some? " 
But even after he has said that, while the 
man would be polite, of course, he would 
see he did not exactly notice him. The 
more prominent he grows in the world the 
more complicated a thing it seems, to be 
somebody in particular. No one takes 
him quite seriously, he finds, even when 
he gets into the United States Senate. If 
what a millionaire really has is nonentity, 
all that he can ever do with great wealth is 
to put his nonentity where more people 
will see it. Nobody pretends to deny that 
a millionaire, by just being a millionaire, 
is important in a way. People give mere 
millionaires as a class, or in the bulk, a cer- 
tain recognition, but they are not interest- 
ing. People try to be interested in them, 
but somehow money that is only interested 
in itself does not make an interesting man. 
Among the real men, who are making the 
real world, and that the real world knows 
233 



Inspired and lovcs, the common humdrum million- 
1 lonaires ^j^^ finds that he is an outsider as a matter 
of course. If one has become a million- 
aire in the quick, unbelieving, or ordinary, 
" business is business " way, one finds 
one's self shut out forever from the great 
and from the worth while — has only the 
most ordinary people to associate 
with, or rows of college presidents ring- 
ing one's door bell. But that is not Soci- 
ety. And even the college presidents are 
restless. Many of them do not call on 
him. Some of them, the bigger ones, 
seem to be almost afraid sometimes he will 
call on them, or that he will shove off 
money on them, publicly, perhaps, or in 
some way that a dignified, scholarly 
institution would not like. Even more 
common people, he finds, not only do not 
pay any attention to him and do not want 
him for himself, but they do not want 
his money, without looking it over care- 
fully and snubbing him in public and ex- 
amining him — before they will let him 
help them convert the heathen with it. 
234 



It does not follow that this picture of How Some 

, . I .-11 •! Money Looks 

how the common, covetous, humdrum mil- 
lionaire is made to feel is overdrawn, be- 
cause the world keeps on year after 
year still being full of humdrum 
millionaires who do not want to 
hide. It is admitted that the humdrum 
millionaires do not want to hide at first. 
They spend their first few years in learning 
to. Hundreds of them can be seen elbow- 
ing about every day and night in every 
center of the world. There is not a man 
anywhere of any real personal impor- 
tance or distinction in the real world to- 
day, but has these fresh arrivals, these im- 
migrants of money all about him, fawn- 
ing upon him, every one of them blind 
and clumsy with money, and out of 
the spirit of the times with money, and out 
of date with it, hoping up vaguely and 
dumbly out of his poor, funny, selfish, 
old-fashioned, little dust-heap, toward the 
men and toward the wealth that the world 
thinks worth while. 

235 



Inspired It is merely a matter of a few years 

Millionaires . .. j xi mt 

expermientmg, and the mere millionaire 
sees these things that the people about him 
see. The only pleasure he has left some- 
times is not to let them know it, and he nat- 
urally makes all the arrangements he can 
think of for looking happy, and for not 
seeming to need things. But at bottom, or 
when nobody is looking, our millionaires 
grow simple. If millionaires were free, 
or if their spirits were free, and had a way 
of wandering around nights, and none of 
us were supposed to know, one could see 
scores of them — of our biggest million- 
aires, almost any fine moonlight night 
now, running like boys again, and all of 
them to a man, making a bee-line for 
Diogenes in his Tub. 

Under the circumstances, and with 
men like these, it does not seem best to 
scold or to worry, or to force millionaires, 
or to try to get millionaires to be saints. 
They are hideous, many of them, and live 
in hideous houses, and are unpleasing and 
236 



uninteresting to be with, perhaps, and How Some 

.1 J • J.1 1 • j.T_ • i_ J. Money Looks 

they are down m the slums in theu* hearts ; 
but the way to do with them is not to be 
superior to them and keep from associat- 
ing with them, but to try to give them a 
sense of opportunity and to make them 
self-respecting. The way to do is to go 
down quietly and start settlements among 
them of people who are happy. 

There are many things to make us hope- 
ful about even our worst cases of mere 
millionaires. Being a mere millionaire is 
a self -limiting disease. The miUionaire 
of the plain, piling-up sort, is making 
comparisons. He is beginning to take 
his wealth seriously. He wants it to say 
pleasant things about him. He is being 
slowly driven into taking a million dollars 
as an art-form because he is seeing 
through himself. 



237 



VIII 

How the People Show Through 

SOCIETY is not dependent for its 
hopefulness on having its million- 
aires see through themselves or upon their 
taking money as a pleasant art-form of 
their own accord. Every man's money 
reveals the man in it, and in the sense of 
being a self-expression has the effect of 
a work of art. One can look up at almost 
any miUion dollars one knows in the 
world to-day, as one goes by, as " A Por- 
trait of the Artist by Himself." What- 
ever it is a man has in him, if he has a mil- 
hon dollars, everybody finds out. It is 
getting to be like a challenge, a kind of 
threat, to all the rich men in our modern 
Hf e — the frankness, the awful naivete of 
a great fortune. 

Dollars are more eloquent than words 
because people notice them more. Every 
238 



detail that is associated with a dollar in How the 
America is vivid and memorable. To the show Thro h 
people who get it and to the people who 
try to get it, and all along the line, every 
dollar in the modern world is read through 
and through and over and over again, as in 
the days of old a poem used to 
be. Dollars are short poems by every-day 
people. We do not miss any of the turns 
or shadings in a dollar. A man could 
talk to us, most of us, until doomsday to 
get acquainted, but if he puts his hand 
into our pockets we know what he is like. 
The last thing a man can do with a mil- 
lion dollars is to keep people from know- 
ing him with it. With five thousand dol- 
lars people will know him five thousand 
dollars' worth, and with a million dollars 
they will know him a million dollars' 
worth. Hetty Green and Helen Gould, 
Robert Ogden, Morris K. Jessup, and 
Russell Sage do not need to be painted 
by John Sargent. Every man who 
knows about their money and about his 
239 



Inspired owii moncy camcs around their portraits 

Millionaires . •, . -, , ttti • j.i i 

m his pocket. Where is the man who 
does not know Russell Sage, and who has 
not been discouraged about the world 
with him, and who has not carried for 
years a good portrait of him, a kind of 
miniature hanging like a little millstone 
about his neck? We love and hate and 
are seers and poets toward the men who 
have what we want. It is another of the 
clouds of the size of a man's hand, the 
transparency of money in the modern 
world. It is what makes us hopeful about 
our milhonaires. A whole planet, now 
that it is all opened up and made into one 
big hving-room, is not going to be trifled 
with. It is sure to do as it likes sooner 
or later, make the millionaire the kind of 
millionaire it wants, because it is always 
sure sooner or later to put him in an ex- 
posed place. The planet is all lighted by 
electricity now. Phonographs are hang- 
ing in the woods. A millionaire cannot 
even whisper on it — and he can only hide 
240 



for a minute. There is nothing Harri- How the 
man can do, except for a very little while, show Through 
to keep his money from telling the truth 
about him, from confiding to everybody 
what kind of a man he is. And it is be- 
cause his money is really telling the truth 
about him at last, in this great world- 
action that is taking place, that it is going 
to inspire the millionaire. At all events it 
comes to me of late, like a sudden piece 
of good news, that under our new and 
special modern conditions it is really true 
that a man who is clever enough to be a 
millionaire, does not need to be wasted if 
he keeps on being clever, and thinking. 
His money builds itself like a great show- 
window around him and puts him in the 
middle of it. The vision of the world 
flows past him and over him. There is 
getting to be nothing he can really do 
under the circumstances but to arrange 
himself to be seen through — his soul and 
his money together — as long as he lives 
and long after he is dead. Perhaps some 
241 



Inspired millionaires would rather die first than 

Millionaires t i • 

be men with their money — the men the 
people are demanding and expecting — 
but I believe that the men who are watch- 
ing them, the men who are going to take 
their places, will begin differently. They 
will begin by being men with their money 
from the start, in the very making of it. 
They will want their money to be re- 
spected and loved — to be human all 
through. 

It does not seem to me that it can be dis- 
missed as poetry, or idealism, to believe 
this. It is mere force of circumstances 
that is going to produce reformed million- 
aires, a mere matter of seeing through 
the millionaires we already have. And 
the more they are seen through, the more 
they will improve. They will want to en- 
joy being seen through. The millionaire 
has the confirmed habit of getting what 
he wants. Being seen through — per- 
haps even being loved — is going to be 
what he wants next. He has had nearly 
242 



all the other things. In the meantime, How the 
whether he wants it or not, the world is show Through 
filled with the vision. It is peremptory. 
The Twentieth Century has given its 
order to rich men and it will be obeyed. 

And this would seem to be coming to 
pass, not by any special revelation or 
gospel for millionaires but by what seems 
to be the elemental, almost mechanical 
action of money upon the modern mind. 
There is not a man living, or who is going 
about his work to-day, whose mind is not 
being pried open by money. These great 
fortunes, like vast searchlights probing 
through the uttermost recesses of human 
life, are making things terrifically plain. 
The trusts themselves, like great gigantic 
stupid prophets stalking the earth, are 
stamping the Bible down into the souls of 
men. They are not meaning to do it, 
but they are. We men of to-day, who are 
living with these vast fortunes fighting 
out the fate of the world above our heads, 
are slowly coming to see that every time 
243 



Inspired a million dollars touches a spiritual or 
Millionaires ^^^^^ ^j^^th it either grinds it into the 

very fiber of the lives of men with its heels, 
or it flames up hope with some strange, 
beautiful light upon the windows of fac- 
tories and upon the hearts of cities. 

We are all going to believe in money 
soon. We are going to have men that 
will make us believe in it. It will be a 
platitude. People will believe in money 
as they believe in telescopes or in X Rays, 
because it is all light. It shows up every 
one. And probably the only way to make 
the habit of having men in this planet a 
safe habit is to keep them exposed. 

It is going to be one of the special con- 
tributions of the twentieth century to the 
great faiths of the world that it will 
make money a part of its creed. It will 
believe that capital is not a meaningless or 
a dead thing. It will see that capital is an 
art-form, a medium of human expression, 
as base or noble, or as destructive or cre- 
ative, as cowardly or believing, as the men 
244 



who stand behind it. It is going to be in- How the 

spired with wealth — and as strong men showThroueh 

are inspired with strength. It will lift it 

up and make it again splendid on the 

earth. The twentieth-century man will see 

that there is no such thing as unmoral 

money, that all capital is either good or 

bad capital. If a man is a noble or true 

man and really has a vision, or something 

he wants to fill out, he will look upon all 

this money going eloquent and vivid and 

beautiful and terrible through the world, 

with covetousness for his vision ; and as an 

artist looks for words, and a composer for 

mighty melodies, and a painter for the 

colors that build the day, he will seek out 

the fortune that shall publish upon the 

mountains and upon the seas and upon 

the hearts of men what he has seen and 

loved. 

Even now, one may go about every- 
where sight-seeing in money — seeing 
men loomed up in it. It is so transparent 
everjrvvhere, this modern money — its 

Z45 



Inspired CTOwds of souls in it showing through, its 

Millionaires n 'i x i /? • •■! ^ 

faces, its streets of men saving themselves 
and being freed and expressed in it, and 
the souls that are being damned in it. 
Day after day I seem to see the streets, as 
I go by or as I look down upon them, 
flowing with gold. Everywhere these 
same human souls struggling up through 
it singing — and the dead and muffled 
faces sweeping past. Not a minute that 
money bears interest, or sings its way up 
into a human life, or bleeds out of a man, 
but it is terrible or beautiful money. Any 
one can look up in these days — see these 
huge fortunes — automobiles lunging 
along like splendid hells, their owners in 
them and the souls they have caught be- 
side them, all being bowled to death to- 
gether. It does not take a man of genius 
to keep from envying money, now, — 
sealed up in its own dullness and helpless- 
ness. It is getting to be the common 
revelation of the world, that a man's 
money cannot be good unless he is. If in 
246 



getting his money a man has let it separate How the 
him from his own soul, the money merely show Through 
goes on after him, wild and blind and 
cruel, separating every other man from 
his soul, that it touches. 

What could be more pathetic, for 

instance, than Mr. as an educator — 

a man who is educating-and-mowing- 
down two hundred thousand (?) men a 
day, ten hours a day, for forty years of 
their lives; that is, who is separating the 
souls of his employees from .their work, 
bullying them into being linked with a 
work and a method they despise, and who 
is trying to atone for it all — this vast 
terrible schooling, ten hours a day, forty 
years, two hundred thousand men's lives 
— by piecing together professors and dol- 
lars, putting up a little playhouse of 
learning, before the world, to give a few 
fresh young boys and girls four years 
with paper books ? — a man the very 
thought of whom has ruined more men 
and devastated more faiths and created 



247 



Inspired morc cowards and brutes and fools in all 

Millionaires ^^ n Tty ±.1 ii • n 

walks 01 liie than any other innuence m 
the nineteenth century, and who is trying 
to eke out at last a spoonful of atonement 
for it all, — all this vast baptism of the 
business world in despair and force and 
cursing and pessimism, by perching up 

before it University, like a dove cote 

on a volcano. 

It may blur people's eyes for a minute, 
but everyone really knows in his heart — 
every man in this nation — that the only 

real education Mr. has estabhshed, 

or ever can establish, is the way he has 
made his money. Everyone knows also 
that the only possible, the only real edu- 
cation Mr. can give to a man would 

have to be through the daily thing he gives 
the man to do, ten hours a day, through the 
way he lets him do it, through the spirit 
and expression he allows him to put into it 

ten hours a day. Mr. 's real school, 

the one with two hundred thousand men 

in it, and eighty million helpless spec- 

348 



tators in the galleries, is a school which How the 
is working out a daily, bitter, lying curse show Through 
upon the rich, and a bitter, lying curse 
upon the poor, which it is going to take 
the world generations to redeem. 

I cannot but believe that when 
the millionaire begins to see capital 
as it really is, the first moment he 
looks upon his own money clearly, 
sees how exposed he is in it, the 
whole curious world Out There looking 
right down through it, into the bottom of 
his soul, it will make a difference. Slowly 
he will be filled with terror if his money 
is not becoming to him, and shame will be 
heaped upon him. If his money is in the 
act of being dull and brutal in the world, 
if it is daily being used in bribing men, in 
driving them to put their souls in one place 
and their work in another, it will begin to 
tell upon him. He will feel himself being 
startled into a vision, into making his 
money say pleasant things about himself. 

He will begin with pleasant nothings 
at first, perhaps. He will make his 

Z49 



Inspired money say the same things about him that 
1 lonaires .^ ^^^ ^^.^ about everyone. Gradually 

he will grow weary of this, and will begin 
to suspect, besides, that the things that 
almost anybody would say with money 
cannot be the most necessary things. The 
mere building of slum settlements, col- 
leges, museums, and parks, and the tossing 
out of other knicknacks (like libraries) at 
this great appalling American public of 
ours — and all the other immemorial con- 
ventionalities and court-plasters of wealth 
with which it tries to mitigate the evil it has 
produced — will not last him long. He 
will want to be thorough. And he will see 
how he looks. When a man has spent all 
his life and all his money in bribing and 
bullying labor, in heaping up machines on 
the souls of men, in making a monstrous 
vacant-minded, hollow-eyed, weary, list- 
less factory-city — giving an art gallery 
to it just before one dies seems a small 
affair. He will begin to see (though it 
may be too late) that it is only at its earn- 
250 



ing end that a man's money really counts, How the 
and the man that goes with it. If money show Through 
is not superficial it must be spent in the 
market-place, in redeeming labor, in put- 
ting the soul on a business basis, in some 
one great industry of the world. The 
beautiful must not be placed around the 
laboring man. It must be placed in his 
heart and made free there, and allowed 
to work out in his hands. 



»Si 



IX 

The Still Revolution 

THE pivot of a man is his faculty for 
ideals. If you want to turn a 
world, the place to get hold to turn it, is 
its Soul. Its soul is what it worships. 

There is no reason to think that the fac- 
ulty of worship is lost to-day or that it 
ever is, or ever will be. Every man de- 
mands something to worship, and what we 
are worshiping in this present mood of 
the world is success. If we worshiped 
failure and martyrdom, which was what 
was worshiped in the early era of Chris- 
tianity, I believe that martyrs would be as 
common and cheap in modern life as mil- 
honaires. If we worshiped military 
glory, as in the days of the Crusades, men 
would crowd into wars and throw their 
fortunes into the glow of death or victory. 
All that has happened is that the world 
252 



has another ideal and that the other ideal The still 

is concrete and scattered about amongst ^®^''^"*^°° 

us. If we had one more great preacher 

as things are going, in the pulpit to-day, 

one that would be half -worshipful, great 

preachers would be seen starting up in 

every quarter of the land, just as a little 

while ago we were starting everywhere 

with young mobs of Mark Hannas. It 

is through the faiths, the great humanized 

embodied ideals — the things that take 

hold of the imaginations of men — that 

the great revolution in America is going 

to be wrought. The vision of Fifth 

Avenue, like a great artery of ideals, is 

seen coursing like fire to-day through this 

whole people. Any other ideal, if a man 

happened to see it — the great procession 

of it — all embodied and stretching and 

glittering out before him, making a kind 

of perspective for his life, would do as 

well. 

Success of any kind at any price is what 
we really worship, and as we are con- 
253 . 



Inspired vinccd just now that money, instead of 
1 jonawes j^^^^g ^ possiblc accompaniment or acci- 
dent of success, is the way to get it, we are 
worshiping money. We are all ideal- 
ists. The appeal to a world's faith or 
worship is the only appeal that will really 
work. The one practical way to bring 
things to pass in this world is to touch 
it with its heroes, to lay across it its vision. 
It does not follow because the idea that is 
put forward in these pages is beautiful — 
because it makes one want to worship a 
little — that it is not practical. The qual- 
ity in an idea of drawing people, i. e., of 
being beautiful, is the one peremptory 
thing in it, the one thing in it that proves 
that nothing can stop it, or can keep it 
from coming to pass. The one energy 
worth reckoning with — the one inejfFable, 
unconquerable energy that rules the 
world — is what it worships. To gather 
up the vision, to flash it across a 
page, and then to fling that page once, 
just once, upon one millionaire's life, to 

*S4 



touch his dreams to the quick — there are The sun 

J 1- T I- 1, 'i' xi. Revolution 

days when 1 have been writing these pages 
when I have felt that this was the one 
supremely practical thing just now, that 
any man could do. I have looked across 
the world upon the young new million- 
aires and I have seen that the first real 
artist who shall appear among them, who 
shall say what I have tried to say, will 
create a new heaven and a new earth. 

Sometimes I have felt, as I have looked 
up and as I have seen the young million- 
aires of this modern world and the young 
artists in it standing together, out there 
across the future, that the inspired mil- 
lionaire would come first. He will be his 
own artist. He will make his money ex- 
press great desires, and great discoveries, 
and noble experiments, sublime wagers, 
and will touch all the young manhood of 
the world. A whole generation of men 
shall be changed with a look. 



255 



X 

Mr. Carnegie as an Experiment Station 
for Millionaires 

THE first and most important thing 
one can do with an ideal for money 
is to see that it is properly worked through 
and defined. This is already being done 
by a world-movement, or slow process of 
specimen rich men, by what might be called 
a sliding scale of millionaires. We see 
slowly — most of us — and when we think 
we have a truth we seem to need to have 
men for it — ^men to try it on. No one ever 
thinks of Mr. Carnegie as merely Mr. 
Carnegie. The world has seized him, has 
cornered him in a huge fortune and is 
now engaged in carving out on him its 
ideal or vision for money. All of Mr. 
Carnegie counts, mistakes and inspira- 
tions alike, so many people's minds are 
trooping through him. What he does and 
Z56 



does not do, and what we think he might Mr. Camegie 
do, make good practice for all of us. I ^g*° station 
have not forgotten some practicing I did for MiiUonaires 
with my own mind, several years ago. 
I particularly remember writing a sen- 
tence (which I am afraid I rather admired 
at the time) about the callow youth of 
wealth. It was something like this: 

" Our millionaires-in-the-rough, mere 
Carnegies floundering in money, stum- 
bHng thoughtlessly along, dropping rows 
of libraries and colleges like kernels of 
corn in a lot, seem to be getting a rather 
easy, clumsy immortality out of the mere 
scale in which they spend their money in 
not thinking of anything." 

But one cannot keep one's mind made 
up very long about Mr. Carnegie. One 
cannot be at all sure that Mr. Carnegie is 
not making his money think things out, 
and, though thinking in such large fig- 
ures is necessarily a somewhat unwieldy 
and cumbersome way of thinking, it has 
to be admitted that by sheer prominence 

^5 7 



Inspired and shccr representativeness, no possible 
MiUionaires ^jg^'^.^ |.jjg modem world could have, for 

thinking out money, could excel Car- 
negie. All the world is thinking it out 
with him and for him. It is as if Mr. 
Carnegie were doing his thinking out 
loud — doing it in cities and nations. It 
rather encourages one when one thinks of 
Mr. Carnegie in this way — as a whole 
population working at things, thinking 
and butting away at truth. He may be 
disappointing sometimes as Mr. Carnegie. 
But as a World Process he does very well. 
The same is true of many of our other 
millionaires, who, looked at by and for 
themselves, fall so terribly short of ideals. 
I find myself more and more taking our 
millionaires as a kind of vast informal 
conversation of a world. Mr. Carnegie 
is the biographical reasoning out and 
thinking through of a whole planet as to 
what on the whole, when it really comes to 
the point, it will do with wealth ; as to the 
place and rights and duties of matter, in 
258 



the making of men and of cities, of Mr. Carnegie 

T n 1 1 1 ii as an Experi- 

crowds of heroes, on the earth. ^^^^ g J^i^„ 

In this connection it is impossible not to for MiUionaires 
be grateful to Mr. Carnegie among our 
millionaires. He is at least interesting. 
And he is doing more (either in black or 
white) to define the ideal than most of the 
others. One is inclined to think, too, that 
the heroic endeavor he is making not to die 
disgraced, or not to be disgraced any 
longer than he can help, has something 
American and sterling and characteristic 
about it. Of course, some of us cannot 
help feehng that while Mr. Carnegie's 
determination to get out of his difficulty 
is original, it is original a little late. It 
would have been more original if he had 
never got into it, or had thought of it in 
time and had been a self -controlled mil- 
lionaire. 

It takes a little of the glory out of being 
an original millionaire and not dying dis- 
graced, when one stops to think that not 
dying disgraced was after all, for Mr. 

»59 



Inspired Camegic, a kind of last resort of original- 
Millionaires .. J lilT-il IJl 

ity and was merely the best he could do 
now, or under the circumstances. One 
remembers that the greater honor of 
money is at its earning end and there are 
many things in the relation of business to 
politics, that it looked right to do forty 
years ago, that the world has painfully 
worked through to seeing would not be 
right now. But it is hardly fair to judge 
what Andrew Carnegie did forty years 
ago by what he would do now. It does 
not follow because a man is a millionaire 
that he should not be allowed to see some 
things, afterwards, like the rest of us. 

In a great crisis of the world we all need 
to be a little more generous, perhaps, than 
is strictly accurate, toward the men who 
on the whole have been trying hard, and 
when I take Mr. Carnegie as a sort of ex- 
periment station for millionaires, when I 
go over the list of most of the other mil- 
lionaires who are in the public eye, there 
come moments — flitting moments at least 
260 



— when Mr. Carnegie looks like an arch- Mr. Camegie 

1 Txj-i T ^ /j.1 • as an Experi- 

angel — a httle dingy, of course (there is ^^^^ g^^^j^^ 
still the same Pittsburg look), but the for Millionaires 
Scotch shines through. And even when 
one thinks that a man's money must not 
merely go into his ideals but must come 
out of them, one cannot help feeling that 
much of Mr. Carnegie's did. It was in- 
evitable that, coming up in the industrial 
system in which life found him, he could 
not but have a wrong ideal or ground 
plan for a millionaire, but it could not 
have been all wTong. There is too much 
Carnegie left. There is no one who does 
not feel a certain personal, eloquent quality 
in Mr. Carnegie both in the making and 
the spending of his money — in distinction 
from Mr. Rockefeller, for instance. 
There is more ring, more workmanship to 
the dollar, or love of the thing itself, less 
politics, or manipulation. His money 
looks more alive all through, more based 
on the discovery and exploiting of 
human beings, and upon insight into their 
261 



Inspired virtucs — not all kinds of virtues, per- 
1 lonaires j^g^^g^ |^^^ ^j^g kind that go with iron and 

that come from Scotland, the land of stern 
glad mothers and of strong men. 

At all events in these present groping 
days, when most of us have all we can do 
to steer our ideals, to get even the right 
aim for money, we may all be grateful to 
Andrew Carnegie. He is not all that we 
want him to be, nor all he wanted to be 
himself, but he does to sight by. 



262 



XI 

On Being Too Big to Do Wrong 

ONE of the greatest difficulties with 
which our miUionaires who would 
like to be inspired have to contend, 
is that they have to conduct business with 
millionaires who do not seem to care about 
it. If the modern business world could 
be so arranged that a millionaire, if he 
wanted to, could go off and be inspired 
alone, there are not a few who would do it. 
But modern business is done largely with 
trusts, it is objected, with millionaires in 
the bulk, great, solid, meaningless masses 
of men who want to be good and will not 
let each other. 

It might seem for the moment almost as 
if there were something a little simple- 
minded and countrified about asking our 
milhonaires, one by one, to be inspired. 
It is not an old-fashioned, personal busi- 
263 



Inspired ncss world any longer, people tell us, in 

Millionaires i • i . • ^ 

which one can go up to a man, a single, 
responsible man, buttonhole him with 
one's idea of what is right and expect him 
to step off promptly and do it. Our mil- 
lionaires are not free. They are all 
tangled in with the system and with one 
another and with unscrupulous competi- 
tors, and cannot do as they like. 

There are two replies to this position. 
In the first place, the millionaire who in- 
vents something that all the world wants, 
who saves all the men on the planet several 
dollars a year and who takes it for granted 
the men are willing to go halves with him 
and who, therefore, keeps the mo- 
nopoly of his invention, can run 
his factory or chain of factories 
as he thinks best, and can be as free 
as anybody, almost as free as a poor man 
or a man who is not in business at all, if 
he likes. This kind of millionaire, who 
gains his freedom and the freedom of 
others by invention or by a world-service 
264 



is, of course, the most natural way out for On Being 
a world that is trying to be hopeful about ^^^^ ^^^ ^ 
wealth. He is the man this book is about, 
and that we must look to first for the gen- 
uine and fair sample of the inspired mil- 
lionaire. 

But in the second place, we are not lim- 
ited to free millionaires. While it is true 
that all the myriads of millionaires who 
are helplessly tangled up in one another 
in one vast ganglion of money ruling the 
world, cannot be expected to be as inspired 
as the free miUionaire, and while it is true 
that most of our millionaires cannot select 
the men they will be with, and cannot say 
whom they shall employ or who shall em- 
ploy them, and cannot say what they shall 
do, or even what their money shall do, and 
therefore cannot be held responsible, one 
by one, like free millionaires or like poor 
people, they are going to be held responsi- 
ble all together by the world around them, 
and they are going to be inspired all to- 
gether in a slow and embarrassed way as 
265 



Inspired f ast as they find it pays. It is merely a 
Millionaires ^^^^^j. ^f time,— finding it pays. Trusts 

have only just been thought of, and not 
unnaturally, for the first few years, being 
enormous and anonymous and unformed, 
they have had an idea that they are too 
big to do right. The next idea they are 
going to have is that they are too big to 
do wrong. They will try to do wrong, 
but they will want to make money — 
great, innocent, vague, pulpy things — 
and they will find that they cannot do it 
more than a few years, without spinal col- 
umns and without morals and without see- 
ing and feeling a world. In the long run, 
the very bigness of the trusts instead of 
keeping them from being inspired is the 
one thing of all others that is going to 
hand them over helplessly into the hands 
of inspired men. There are not going to 
be very many more trusts that will be as 
stupid and as unsuccessful and short- 
lived as the Standard Oil Company, an 
institution founded upon a great, natural 
266 



resource, and which instead of being a On Being 
failure and running its course in a single ^J'^^ '^^.^j^ 
generation should have been the establish- 
ing of a business house that should have 
lasted for hundreds of years and should 
have been one of the great dignities, one 
of the monuments of America in the eyes 
of the world. If it had had inspired men, 
men who saw a whole world, men who 
saw the times and the nations and the 
newspapers and the governments and the 
peoples, it would not have been so inef- 
ficient as an organization, so incapable as 
a mere machine, as in a comparatively few 
years to get into a head-on collision with 
a nation, put itself where it has no stand- 
ing or credit or liberty, and is not allowed 
to conduct its own business in its own way. 
The real reason the managers of the 
Standard Oil Company have been at- 
tacked by the people is not that they have 
been wicked, but that they have been in- 
competent and have not been big enough 
to conduct their business. The modern 
167 



Inspired busincss world is getting too big for small 
Millionaires ^^^ ^^^ Small moials to scc through it or 

to see around it or to do permanent things 
in it. Nearly all of the trusts are learning 
that they are up against the whole world 
in business and that they will have to get 
great men, men who know a whole world 
and who see it and live in it — to conduct 
their business. The things the modern men 
are trying to do are too big and too perma- 
nent not to be moral. It is merely a mat- 
ter of a few more experiments and every- 
body will believe it. A big house has to be 
permanent, and if it is to be permanent it 
must have a great deal of capital and if it 
is to have a great deal of capital it must 
make people believe in it — and believe in 
it a hundred years ahead, and it is not prac- 
tical for such a business house not to be 
good. The more successful and prominent 
business men propose to be, the more they 
are driven into doing right. If they are 
big enough men to make their business 
everybody's business, everybody is going 
268 



to watch it. Instead of having" firms, as we On Being 
have for some time, that are too big to to^^o'^pon 
have to do right, we are going to have 
firms very soon that will be so big that the 
right will be the only practical course left 
open to them. This is what we are com- 
ing to. We are this very day, with our 
boundless railroads, our mighty canals, 
and our steamers like great cities swing- 
ing across the sea, watching the birth 
of a new ethics. The whole modern 
business world with its immense com- 
binations is full of hope. We are all 
beginning to guess it. The very news- 
papers are full of it. If you are very big, 
it is really not quite bright to be wicked. 
If you are little or short-lived, it might 
not matter or seem to matter so much — 
that is, less will be done to you. You will 
not be picked out and punished. We are 
going to have our big men good first, in 
the modern business world, and those who 
would like to be big. Then after that, 
when the big men have been made good, — 
269 



Inspired been fairly crowded over to it, the little 
1 lonaires ^^^^ ^.j^ ^^ attended to. This perhaps is 

the main experience one gets out of tak- 
ing up a morning paper and reading 
from day to day the news about the trusts 
— the sense of this sublime solar march or 
force of gravity in morals, swinging us 
on into righteousness, into a kind of inevit- 
able matter of fact hope. Some one will 
write a book very soon, and he will relate 
the bare facts, sum up ten years of news- 
columns, and tell the trusts to be good. 
And there will not be any cant or religi- 
osity or benevolence in the book. It will 
be pure business, business at white heat, 
or raised to the nth power, and all 
the while it will be such nice worldly read- 
ing and make one feel precisely as if one 
had been at church ! All that there would 
have to be in such a book would be some 
real religion underneath and some real 
facts on top (statistics almost would do 
it), showing what the moral experi- 
ments of the trusts have been and how 
270 



underwitted it is to take all the money On Being 
one can ffet. We have always known that , °?^^l^, 

° -' to Do Wrong 

it ought to be underwitted, but we have 
been wanting to have it proved and 
built into the world. We could 
not be optimistic about having a new 
ethics — or what many people seem to 
think is a new ethics — adopted by a whole 
world, if it were just a little thing of our 
own, an idea we had worked up by our- 
selves or that some good, kind gentleman 
somewhere had just thought of. But it 
is in the nature and momentum of things. 
In an age when one can look out, almost 
any day, and watch people, the more 
prominent, superior people, being fairly 
pushed or jostled over into goodness, it 
does not seem (as it has lately) merely 
weak-minded and hopeful to be good, or 
to keep on believing in it. 

There is no denying that if a manufac- 
turer wants to do wrong he can do it in a 
small way by picking carefully out of a 
whole world, people he can cheat here and 
271 



Inspired there, but if he wants to do a big business 
1 onaires — ^ y^^^ characteristic modern business, a 
business in which he will have to cheat 
everybody — he will sooner or later — it is 
merely a matter of experiment — be good 
and practical. The larger advertisers 
have already found — most of them — 
that the more they advertise the more hon- 
est they have to get. It is everybody's 
affair when one does wrong to a planet. 
One man or a single newspaper can stop 
it, or a novehst who spends six weeks in 
Chicago. One single thorough-minded, 
honest woman, with a fountain pen, can 
touch off the world like a bomb, and 
bring down the weight of a whole nation 
upon a man with a can of kerosene in 
Cleveland. " The way of the transgres- 
sor is hard " in a world with the printing 
press and with the electric light in it, and 
Ida Tarbell. " The way of the transgres- 
sor is hard " instead of being an old, 
worthy, and rather helpless remark 
tucked safely away in a bible, is being 
27* 



writ large across the world. It is seen in On Being 
shop windows now as well as in Sunday ^ of Wron 
Schools, and is attracting attention. 

It is not strictly true, perhaps, that we 
are going to have a new ethics to go with 
the new unity of the world. But it is 
going to look like a new ethics and seem 
for a time to many people like an exact con- 
tradiction of what we have. When business 
houses were small and were all tucked away 
into separate nations or pigeon-holes on the 
planet, many wrong things were practical, 
or at least practical-looking, that are not 
practical now. Modern thought and mod- 
ern machinery have torn nearly all of our 
little pigeon-hole nations down. Every na- 
tion is penetrated in business with every 
other nation. The empires are all being 
j umbled together into buying their kerosene 
at the same place. The nations stand and 
gossip on the corner, and there are no con- 
veniences now for being mean privately. 
Business houses that are too big to find 
room on the world to do wrong in, do right. 
273 



Inspired This fact of being so crowded that there 

Millionaires • t j. i • i • in 

IS no place to hide, is merely oi 
itself bringing to pass what would look 
like a new ethics. The ordinary old- 
fashioned business principle of getting 
all one can, did well enough, perhaps, 
when applied to a butcher business in a 
village. But let the same principle be 
applied to the feeding of a whole world, 
to the Armour Packing Co., for instance, 
and everybody sees that there is some- 
thing the matter with it. When the 
Armour Packing Co. remarks to a hungry 
planet, politely but firmly, " Business is 
business " (a thing they have always be- 
lieved before), nobody believes it. The 
very governments of the world (the slow- 
est of all) have stopped believing it. It 
was always a lie even in a small village 
butcher business, but the lie was on such a 
small scale that only a few people here 
and there noticed it. If the great mass 
of people are to be convinced of a spir- 
itual truth it takes a man like John P. 
174 



Rockefeller to do it. This is why the On Being 
situation is so encouraging. Mr. Rocke- to^DoWrone: 
feller and Mr. Armour and Mr. Harri- 
man are doing us so much good. Every- 
body prefers the truth, and it is merely a 
matter of getting the truth put in enough 
dollars — and enough of their own dollars 
— for people to see it. This seems to be what 
the trusts are for — getting the truth big 
enough — taking just any ordinary truth 
from out of the New Testament and mak- 
ing it so big almost anybody could see it. 
One at a time, the trusts are cornering 
lies. They are putting the devil where 
he cannot help himself. In religion, of 
course, and, perhaps, in education and in 
the arts, there will be some important 
things left to the devil ; but in business, in 
the grosser forms of business, at least, 
where people care so much and think so 
hard and have Mr. Rockefeller and Pres- 
ident Baer to help, they are going to see 
through him. He will have to move on. 



27s 



XII 

The Next Corner of the World 

FIFTEEN years ago one could 
hardly have found a government in 
the civilized world, which when it had 
something to say to another government, 
did not suppose it would not have to tell 
the truth very economically. Individual 
men when they were dealing with one 
another told the truth, fifteen years ago, 
but nations were too big. About this 
time John Hay, a poet and a gentleman 
from Cleveland, Ohio — a sort of spirit- 
ual step-son of Abraham Lincoln — was 
made Secretary of State by William 
McKinley, and it came over Mr. Hay, 
after not very many weeks, that being 
Secretary of State would be really a much 
pleasanter position if one did not have to 
be so economical with the truth in it. It 
took away the breath of Europe almost at 



Corner 

of the World 



first to have a novice from America, a The Next 
comparatively new diplomat come trip- 
ping into the grave two thousand years of 
diplomacy, and in that quiet, natural 
western way begin telling the truth right 
and left among the great governments of 
the world. But they noticed that Mr. 
Hay did things and they became thought- 
ful. 

There is a rumor going the rounds now 
that since John Hay has shown how easy 
it was to be a Secretary of State and say 
what one really thought, the whole face of 
diplomacy — the atmosphere of foreign 
legations the world around has been 
changed. Lying, except among the 
smaller and weaker nations, in dealing 
with the other smaller and weaker nations 
is not considered practical nor quite busi- 
nesslike and up-to-date. 

Eight years ago the regular politicians 
of this country rose up en masse almost to 
a man, and told us that Theodore Roose- 
velt would never do as the leader of the 



277 



Inspired Republican party, and that he was not 

Millionaires i'ij.ij.i x j'j jj? 

practical, that he was too candid and free 
with people, that he was not pohtic 
enough to be a President of the 
United States. To-day these same men 
are finding fault with Mr. Roosevelt 
because they were mistaken about 
him and because, by being open with 
the people and by not being pohtic- 
looking, he can do with the people 
almost anything he Hkes, and is the 
biggest politician of us all. The people 
seem to have been convinced, even the 
politicians have been — that a President of 
the United States does not need to be 
somebody else to succeed, and can quite 
resemble himself, if he likes. And now 
that it has been proved, that a public man's 
being himself in America is good poli- 
tics, thousands of little Roosevelts are 
springing up all over the country, men 
who are like Roosevelt and have always 
had it in them, but had never let anybody 
know it. The very ward poHticians, 
278 



many of them, are being built to-day on The Next 
Roosevelt lines. ^Zl\r ,. 

of the World 

Entirely aside from approval or dis- 
approval of his policies no one would 
probably deny that whether it be for bet- 
ter or worse or richer or poorer, such an 
arrangement or invention as Theodore 
Roosevelt as a President of the United 
States would not have been thought pos- 
sible ten years ago. 

Two years ago, people were saying of 
Charles E. Hughes that he never would 
really do for a governor. He was all very 
well, but he could not get things done, and 
he could not dicker with the regular poli- 
ticians enough to put things through. 
And it looked as if they were right, and 
as if the governor were what they sup- 
posed at first. For weeks, day after day, 
in the capitol at Albany the supposed exec- 
utive was seen sitting in the supposed ex- 
ecutive chair (the supposed icicles dripping 
from it) in a supposed attitude of mixed 
moral grandeur and helplessness, and 
279 



Inspired gibcs and threats were thrown at him by 
1 lonaires ^^^ ^j^ ^^^ ^^^ worldly legislators return- 
ing to their homes. 

And what did the whipped-looking gov- 
ernor, with all his threats and dares heaped 
up upon him and upon his icicles, do? 

He did one of the most memorable and 
enlightened silences that has ever been 
done by any man in the United States. 
And suddenly it was as if in that silence 
one could hear a whole State being taken 
up bodily and moved over — moved over 
calmly and quietly — by one man simply 
by that one man's being right. It was 
one of the biggest, stillest, most uncon- 
scious acts of pure energy that this coun- 
try has ever seen. It came like a 
revelation -^ almost like an apocalypse — 
in our national politics, of how a single and 
simple natural man merely by being right, 
and being right in a plain, two-plus- 
two-equals-four way, could make six mil- 
lion people, a whole state ful of people, all 
sitting quietly in their homes, step out and 

z8o 



do things. The poHticians were all kindly The Next 

but firmly sent back to the Legislature, of theVorid 

the humble servants of a governor of the 

people who without lifting his hand or 

without saying a word apparently could 

make politicians do right. It was like 

one of the great, quiet acts of nature. 

Who would have thought three years ago 

it would be practical in American politics 

just to be still and be right? But now 

that righteousness and silence judiciously 

mixed have been tried in a great State 

like New York, and where everyone could 

see, the whole face of national politics has 

changed. People have learned that a 

silence by Charles E. Hughes in this 

country is so practical that it is going to 

be hard to keep him many years, from 

being a President of the United States. 

All that was necessary was to give a 

sample silence to the country at large and 

prove that the thing could be done and 

now in two or three years, thousands of 

these little Hughes's silences will be seen 



Inspired Springing up all over this country, 
X lonaires ^^^ thousands of the little Hughes's 
silences and thousands of the little 
talking Roosevelts will be seen going 
on side by side from Maine to CaUf ornia. 
Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hughes, both vital 
and unlike, have released and set in ac- 
tion all the men who are like them in the 
United States. The people have always 
wanted men like these — now and then 
one like Lincoln has broken through in 
public life, men of courage and indi- 
viduality, and who incorrigibly resemble 
themselves, but the experiment had not 
been tried where everybody could see it for 
some time, and men like these had been 
keeping out of politics for years. It was 
supposed if you wanted to make the most 
of yourself in politics in this country, the 
people would want you to look as much 
like somebody else as you could. And 
now the entire poHtical atmosphere of the 
country has been cleared and politics is 
full of zest and ozone again and looks 
hke a place for doing things. 



People are right only in a minor sense The Next 
when they say, as they almost always do, of theVorid 
that in this old world we may expect new 
things now and then, if we must, but we 
must not expect new human nature, and 
that Man only never changes. 

There is not a man on the whole planet, 
nor has there been one for hundreds of 
years, who has not been a different man 
all over in his ideas and personality and 
in the motives of his life because of Co- 
pernicus, or who does not see himself and 
the little, comical, out-of-the-way planet 
he is on, in an opposite light. Let men be 
confronted with one great new fact, some 
sudden turn of science, some great new 
corner of the world, like Copernicus, and 
we can almost stand by and see human 
nature changing before our eyes. Pre- 
cisely the same people may suddenly be 
seen almost any time doing precisely op- 
posite things. They come to the next 
corner of the world and stand a minute 
and look. That is all that happens. 
283 



Inspired Probably there is a man this very minute, 

Millionaires i • ■ i i j / • j.i i • \ 

somewhere m the world (m the tropics), 
who is thinking that he knows all about 
water, that water is wet, and that it is 
warm, and that it flows, and if he were 
told that all the while, at the very time that 
he was thinking about it, dried, cold rain 
in chunks was being carried from house 
to house and peddled about in wagons, he 
would not believe it. And yet it is all 
done easily enough. Precisely opposite 
things are true in the same half inch on a 
thermometer. What people will do at 
one temperature of public opinion does 
not show what they will do at another. 
Over and over again in history something 
will seem almost impossible or like a revo- 
lution in morals and there will come a rise 
of temperature in public opinion, and all 
is changed with a look. Our very air- 
castles turn suddenly solid and things in 
the sky men have looked on for years, 
they walk up and down on calmly. They 
go about cutting water with axes or run- 
284 



ning railroad trains with a shut-up cloud The Next 
as if nothing had happened. These of thrworid 
things are nothing to us and human na- 
ture boils, freezes, and evaporates with 
new facts and the moral nature of man is 
a live thing and it becomes solid, liquid, or 
iron, or like water or cloud, according to 
the last new facts and according to what 
we saw when we turned the last corner of 
the world. 

This is the way evolution affected us, 
many of us, within our memories. It 
turned our whole world over in a minute. 
Some of us who had been wondering 
about the world, and wondering vaguely 
and unconsciously all the time why it had 
not been turned over before, were glad, 
and those who were not good evolution- 
swimmers, were sorry, but the fact re- 
mains, whether people liked it or not, that 
the world had been turned over by Dar- 
win and an earth-worm and was warming 
a whole new side of itself, and that 
nothing in a man's brain will ever be done, 
285 



Inspired OP cvei' be thought, since evolution has 

Millionaires , -,. i . •! ii 

been discovered, m quite the same way. 
'New styles and new geologies are sweep- 
ing past his consciousness — past all his 
little, old, funny, pompous, hemmed-in 
thoughts, and the very structure of his 
brain is changed. Infinity flowing out 
of the infinite and on to the infinite across 
the little cells in his skull is making him a 
new creature. Evolution, which is the 
last great corner of the world, has created 
in most of us whole new sets of motives 
and emotions and has cut away our old 
ones. It has brought us face to face 
suddenly with this great new stretch of 
the souls of men. 

" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken ; 

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes 
He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 

Looked at each other with a wild surmise — 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien." 

In the same way a new ethics in busi- 
ness, or what will look like it, is being 
brought to pass by the changes in our 

286 



physical ideas of the earth and of the The Next 
furnishings and conveniences of the little onhe World 
strip of atmosphere around it. The mod- 
ern ideas about dust and germs are revo- 
lutionizing men's conduct toward one an- 
other. The germs are at work day and 
night, millions of them to a cubic inch, 
sociaHzing us. They are making men 
respect each other and notice each 
other. They are making men care 
about one another's very breathing in 
the streets. Who would have thought 
fifteen years ago that one would come on 
a sign like this in a car in New York? 

SPITTING ON THE FLOOR OF THIS CAR IS 
A MISDEMEANOR 

FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS FINE 

OR IMPRISONMENT FOR ONE YEAR 

OR BOTH 

MAY BE THE PUNISHMENT THEREFOR 

No one would have believed, who had 
declared when Dickens was in America in 
'42, that the time would come in this coun- 
try before many years, when a man could 

2S7 



Inspired be charged, or informed seriously that he 
1 lonaires jjjjgjj|. ^^ charged, five hundred dollars for 

spitting in the streets. And yet this is 
merely one instance of the way that all 
scientific discoveries to-day are bring- 
ing men closer together and putting their 
conduct on a closer and more mutual and 
ethical basis. In a world where science 
has made even another man's breathing a 
personal matter, the way another man 
does his business becomes a personal mat- 
ter. Religion and poetry for thousands 
of years have tried to make men intimate 
enough to understand, and now science 
is making men intimate enough to 
be good. A telephone on a man's desk 
puts a whole continent in the next room, 
and he begins to act as if it were there. 
The very structure of his brain is changed 
by it. His sins and his virtues come back 
in a minute and in whatever he does, he is 
immeasurably aware of others. Rail- 
roads, telephones, wireless telegraphs, 
and great cities are making new human 



beings, and new incredibly socialized men The Next 
out of all of us, and the lonely each-on- of thrworid 
your-own-hill morals of the Old T^esta- 
ment, when we have had a hundred years 
of telephones, will look palezoic. Christ 
and St. Paul converted a few thousand 
individuals in each generation out of mil- 
lions of so-called Christians. Railroads, 
gas-bills, and coal trusts, and telephones 
are going to convert us all. 

No one would have imagined sixty 
years ago, when people were giving up 
stage coaches for railroads, how religious 
railroads were. People are being crowded 
in such close quarters that they have to be 
converted to stand it. The rich and the 
poor, and the good and the bad, and the 
weak and the strong, can no longer be 
kept carefully sorted out by themselves, 
and when men do right or wrong to-day 
it is no longer their own affair. The 
germ theory or policy has precipitated 
upon men an entirely new conduct of hu- 
man affairs. Kodaks, moving pictures, 
289 



Inspired Public Utilities Commissions follow our 
onaires jgg^^gj.g about and shut them oiF from hav- 
ing separate interests. Mosquitoes and 
reporters vie with each other in inoculat- 
ing everybody with everybody else. 
Every man's business is every other man's 
business. Germs, tuberculosis, the gypsy 
moth, canned meats, railroads, and tele- 
phones and all the other terrifically inti- 
mate things work day and night jostling 
the world together to be good. There is 
no known way in the modern world for 
men to be strictly selfish or strictly in a 
class by themselves. A sick rat in San 
Francisco startles the whole United 
States and New York builds the sewers of 
Havana. We care if they have the bu- 
bonic plague in India and if they adulter- 
ate drugs in China, and when the Penn- 
sylvania Railroad wants to reduce the 
wages of its employees it begins by cut- 
ting the salaries of the president and the 
directors and of the men at the top. The 
old, neat, safe, pleasant, and comfortable 
290 



moral compartments the world was di- The Next 
vided into, twenty years ago, have been of°[UeVorid 
broken down. Bacteria, influenza, mail- 
orders, country trolleys, and rural deliv- 
eries, and newspapers, and socialist-mil- 
lionaires championing the cause of the 
poor, street railway magnates and Tom L. 
Johnsons fighting for the rights of the 
people, have jumbled the world together 
and Fifth Avenue and the Bow- 
ery may be seen at last trooping 
daily through each other, and the rail- 
way presidents and brakemen are arm 
in arm. The old conventional business 
ethics of getting all that one can out 
of everybody looks old-fashioned in a 
minute, in a world like this, a world so 
terribly and closely arranged, where the 
chickens come home to roost, where germs 
and rebates and tuberculosis and life in- 
surance and even the very railroads come 
home to roost. The new business ethics 
of not getting all that one can, whether or 
no, and of conducting a bargain so that 
291 



Inspired all conccmed will be glad and will want to 

Millionaires iir • 'xi-i a it 

come back, becomes inevitable. A world 
where if one wants to get rich, one must 
do it by dealing with the same people 
over and over again, invents a new busi- 
ness man. The new business man sees 
that in the twentieth century jumping on 
another man's toe in business, is merely a 
more round-about way of jumping on 
one's own. The best millionaire has al- 
ready reckoned with this. He does not 
like to have to stand by and see a fellow 
millionaire getting rich by ruining the 
business in which they are both engaged. 
There were hundreds of millionaires a 
few years ago during the great coal 
strike who saw how President Baer looked 
and who wished they could control him a 
little, and could make him look more in- 
telligent, and more aware of things. They 
could not quite bear to see him all that 
long winter, morning after morning as 
the papers appeared, going out calmly 
day after day in the sight of all of us 
292 



dumping his garbage into his own The Next 
spring. Rebates and suppressed inven- of the'worid 
tions, hold-up trusts, monopolies based on 
position rather than invention, or upon 
number rather than merit and service, fail 
to work in a world as intimate and as 
highly organized as this and as nervously 
endowed with telegraph all through, 
where everything that happens to one part 
of the body of society is flashed through 
to the other parts, and where a rich man's 
panic or a mere poor man's hardship is 
an impossibility. 

A few winters ago, at the time of the 
great public hold-up in coal, when the 
whole United States almost had to go to 
bed to keep warm, and was lying there 
wondering what kind of a man President 
Baer was, and what he could be thinking 
of or had been thinking of all these years, 
the United States thought the whole mat- 
ter out and invented its first rough sketch 
or outline of the new millionaire. Scores 
of semi-inspired millionaires were begun 
293 



Inspired that winter and one or two, it has always 

Millionaires j , n m • 

seemed to me, young, anonymous, lully m- 
spired millionaires must have heen begun, 
too. 

And yet President Baer had been doing 
nothing new, that winter. He had been 
merely proceeding upon the old common 
business ethics of always getting all one 
can. It was not that he was merely differ- 
ent from what he ought to be, but that he 
brought the difference out for us when we 
were chilled-through and thoughtful. He 
was merely another corner of the world 
and when the world got to him it was 
not pleased with the way he made human 
nature in business look. It was not merely 
that President Baer was hard and blind 
as he stood there all that winter and 
seemed to us, as a typical business man, a 
little underwitted. He made us begin to 
suspect our whole business ethics. Per- 
haps he had not been after all more under- 
witted in proportion than the rest of us. 
He had merely put more capital into it. 

a94 



We began quite generally to conceive The Next 

slowly, as we thought about these things of the World 

out in the cold, a new and different type 

of business man, the type of business man 

that would not have to be apologized for by 

always saying what a fine personality he 

was in private life. The coal strike caught 

us hoping and wondering, and making up 

our minds about business. We made up 

our minds that business should not be any 

longer a specially marked-off barbarian 

country, a fighting-place or cock-pit 

where a man can go out and crowd and 

bully and strike below the belt and steal 

for his family, and then come back into 

the house and put on his coat and coo to 

the baby and be a beautiful character until 

ten the next morning. 

Since the coal strike, we have been con- 
fronted with new facts. We have turned 
the next corner of the world. 

Nothing is more wildly romantic or 
sentimental than despair or than being 

295 



Inspired discouragcd about the world and judging 
1 lonaires ^j^g^^ jg goiug to be merely by what is. 

In a world where new inventions are giv- 
ing new powers, new areas of insight and 
fields of action at every turn it is not prac- 
tical not to calculate on new and opposite 
things in men, and it is not hard-headed 
not to have visions of what men will be 
like. We are already beginning to see 
that there are going to be such things as 
sky-scraper rights to consider soon and 
automobile laws of the road, that there 
is going to be such a thing as balloon terri- 
tory, with ethical, legal problems. How 
many miles high can a man own air above 
his own real estate? All the new inven- 
tions are introducing about us new ethical 
considerations and all the new scientific 
relations of the world are being followed 
by new moral relations. The impossibili- 
ties become the platitudes when men have 
turned another corner of the world. Peo- 
ple would have said once that bicycles 
were impossible. People would have 
296 



said two years ago that a rail- The Next 
way train balanced high up on a single onhe World 
rail and running like a bicycle on a tight- 
rope, at no one knows how many miles 
an hour, would be absurd, and the same 
people are saying that an inspired mil- 
lionaire, a millionaire who happened to 
enjoy making and spending his money in 
a little more mutual, permanent way than 
others would be out of the question. 

And yet when the idea of an inspired 
millionaire has been invented and per- 
fected and one has been finished off — 
or one or two — they will be introduced 
and installed like electric lights, tele- 
phones, and trollies and central power 
houses in every city in the United States. 
The fact seems to be coming out all about 
us that the world is not inventing merely 
new kinds of machines, but, with Coperni- 
cus, Jesus, Darwin, Bell, Lord Kelvin, 
Rousseau, Columbus, Wordsworth, Lin- 
coln, Whitman, Emerson, Edison, and 
Marconi, it is slowly inventing new kinds 
297 



Inspired and ncw sizes of men. Out of all these 
kinds and sizes of i 
inspired millionaire. 



Millionaires t • ^ j* r> ,i mit- 

kmds and sizes oi men there will be one 



I was talking on this general subject 
with Brim the other day and he remarked 
that I must try not to be too hopeful. 
Brim is wise in the wisdom of this world. 

" Why? " I said. 

I then gathered from the general tenor 
of Brim's remarks that in his opinion when 
a man sees poetry in machinery and wants 
other people to, he ought to hold in a 
little and not be too hopeful about it. He 
intimated that it would not do, while peo- 
ple were going by, to stand mooning 
around a factory looking up at it as if it 
were a sunset or an aurora borealis. It did 
not do any good, he intimated; and in 
the same way, when a man sees poetry in 
business or almost a new religion in being 
rich, it would be much better to feel one's 
way on it carefully and not expect people 
to hope much. 

298 



I could see that Brim was veering The Next 
slowly around to what I had just been of the World 
telling him was in this book, and he ad- 
mitted, finally, that for all practical pur- 
poses — at least according to my own ac- 
count of it — I had written a very dis- 
couraging book. It would not do, he 
said. It antagonized people to have any- 
one expect so much. The very title I had 
taken, he thought, would drive people 
away. I confess that he made me feel 
lonely and morbid for a little, while he 
went on. There was no getting at me 
after all, apparently, I thought, I was in 
a bottomless pit of hope. 

I asked him how he thought it would do 
to hope just as much, but, perhaps put the 
hope off for two or three hundred years. 

He thought it would help. 

I asked him how it would strike him if 
I took the hope, the same hope that is in 
the book, not changing it in the least, and 
keeping all its elements in it, and nar- 
rowed it down to one millionaire. 
299 



Inspired He thought it would help, and that a 

Millionaires i i •■_! t_ j. • • i mt • • 

book With but one inspired millionaire m 
it might do, perhaps. 

A little memory of this conversation (I 
felt during it a little the way Abraham 
did, probably, when he was trying to nar- 
row down God as to how few people he 
would save Sodom for) has just come over 
me while I am in this last chapter and am 
taking my last chance at the reader, and 
perhaps it can do no harm, in bringing to a 
close what I have had to say about 
inspired millionaires, to call attention 
to the fact that I have not given 
dates in this book or lists of names. One 
inspired millionaire is all that this 
book is about — my responsibility stops 
with him. I have not found it hard to 
confine myself to believing in one inspired 
millionaire, because it has seemed to me 
that one inspired millionaire would be 
enough. 

One telephone was enough. 



300 



Epilogue 



WE HAVE come to the parting of 
the ways. We are about to 
choose between the socialized millionaire 
and socialism. 

We must either believe that human na- 
ture is a success or is yet a possible success, 
that it is possible to evolve out of what we 
have a man who is great enough to be rich 
— a socialized millionaire — or we must 
believe that human nature is a failure and 
that it is going to be, and that the best 
that can be done with it now, is to fall 
back on socialism. 

The human race is gathering itself to- 
gether for a last great struggle around 
the world, to respect itself. 

The better and more obvious aims and 

criticisms of the socialists belong to all of 

us, and our quarrel with socialism is with 

sociahsm as a means. We do not believe 

301 



Inspired in curing the evils of society by emascula- 
MiUionaires ^.^^^ j^ j^^^ Seemed to us that socialism is 

born of despair and infidelity, and of the 
mere natural first failures of human na- 
ture in dealing with the great new ex- 
periments like trusts and railroads and 
with the new sudden unity of the world. 
It has seemed to us that socialism has been 
based upon an ignoble and temporary and 
one-sided interpretation of human nature, 
and that America has come to the point 
where we must choose which interpreta- 
tion we shall now believe. Shall we beheve 
in natural selection, in freedom, and man- 
hood, in the voluntary service, and the 
nobiUty of men; or shall we believe that 
men have failed, that it must be accepted 
as a truth that men are vulgar and mean 
in their motives, and that their righteous- 
ness must be the righteousness of slaves, 
that they must be emasculated, their power 
to do wrong taken away from them, 
and must be managed like automatons by 
society or by a machine from the outside? 

30» 



It has seemed to us that what the Epilogue 
American people is really believing to-day 
is not socialism, a tired, discouraged im- 
portation from an older world, but that it 
is ready to believe that men may be de- 
liberately true and enviable and generous, 
and that society may be based from the 
bottom to the top on the capability of men 
for noble, voluntary, individual social de- 
velopment. We have believed in America 
that a noble individualism can produce a 
noble society. This is our American vis- 
ion. And in spite of all the noble-hearted 
men among the ranks of the socialists it 
has seemed to us that sociahsm is a 
momentary failure of the modern imagi- 
nation, the imagination to see the real 
facts about us as they are, and in their 
larger and more noble and permanent rela- 
tions. This supreme act of imagination upon 
our modern world is what America is for. 

What has made this country seem great 
in the eyes of the world before has always 
been its imagination, its habit of bold con- 
303 



Inspired ccption, of boundlcss initiative, and its 
1 onaires ^'g-^j^g ^f action and of future men and of 

future events. 

What has made this country seem small, 
and, for so great a country, a httle mean 
and common in spirit at times, has been 
its occasional seizure with a lack of imagi- 
nation. Where there is no vision the peo- 
ple perish. 

In the years before the Civil War when 
we failed or nearly failed, and when the 
nations of the older world were taunting 
us, we nearly failed because we broke 
with our national genius or our imagina- 
tion, our power of shaping and welding 
unsettled things and decided like the older 
peoples, that perhaps, after all, we would 
better fall back into settled ones. We 
failed or nearly failed because we stopped 
working on the world with our imagina- 
tions and abandoned our national instinct, 
our national temperament, our native air 
of the possible or of the future, and sud- 
denly, in the sight of all the older peoples 
304 



of the earth, did not dare to beheve more Epilogue 
than they could. 

It had been our beHeving more than 
they could that had made us what we were. 
And when both in the North and the South 
our leading men, both in pubhc and 
private, stopped believing and tried 
patching and compromising instead, 
and when most of us in the North 
and the South were living our lives 
and arranging our convictions from 
hand to mouth as best we could, now 
up and down and now down and up, from 
day to day in a kind of see-saw of expedi- 
ency, we were taunted by half the earth. 
It was not American to be morally diplo- 
matic. We did not know how to do it. They 
do these things better in Paris, or among 
the older, more wearily experienced peo- 
ples. With their moral old age and moral 
anodynes they can make at least an ele- 
gant, becoming, or almost graceful-look- 
ing thing out of half-belief or half -action 
and compromise. 

305 



Inspired But wc are young — a kind of splendid 

child nation — and our strength, like the 
strength of the child, and like the strength 
of the West, lies in our seeing the truth 
and doing it together. It is particularly- 
true of us, " Where there is no vision the 
people perish." 

It has been because we imagined more 
and believed harder about ourselves than 
the older nations that we have led the 
nations of the earth, and that in these 
things they have wanted us to. They have 
silently given the future into our hands 
and have called it our territory. They 
have seen that out of all of them it belongs 
to us to be the ones that should lead in the 
things of the future, because we seemed to 
believe easily and naturally where they 
have to try, and because we track out the 
future with nonchalance. In the things 
that are settled the older nations lead us; 
but in those greater things, the things that 
are still unsettled, the ennobling and ful- 
filling of the daily labor of the common 
306 



men of the earth, we are touched with a Epilogue 
strength that is not our own. The 
strength of the desires and the postponed 
hopes of the old and of the tired nations 
is upon us. We are strong because we are 
the spokesmen of the prayers of a world. 
America is not a theory — a map or chart 
of what men might be. America is a vis- 
ion that a great people have wrought — 
out of wars and revolutions they have 
wrought it — a vision of free voluntary 
men, rich and poor, in a new, fresh land, 
fulfilling themselves and fulfilling one 
another together. 

The real vision or ideal of the typical 
American is the aristocrat. He has come 
to America because he has a new and noble 
idea of what an aristocrat is. The aristo- 
crat in America is the man who is more 
of a democrat than other people have the 
brains to be, the man who can identify 
himself with the interests and with the 
points of view of the most kinds of people. 

The man who is the working vision of 
307 



Inspired ouF pcoplc, who is Hiost regarded, who is 

Millionaires , , i • j • a • i i 

almost worshiped m America, wherever he 
emerges, is the man who is most individual 
and mutual, who stands the most for him- 
self, and the most for all the people. 

If what I have tried to put in this book 
is a mere theory or map or chart, it will 
not live and reproduce itself, but if it is a 
vision, if it is the live actual thing itself — 
merely the more spiritual, more intangible 
body with which it comes at first, I have 
seen that it shall live and multiply, that a 
great people shall rise in it and daily dwell 
in it, that they shall embody it in them- 
selves and imbed it in the world, that they 
shall materialize it before our eyes. Then 
it shall be seen by all of us. Then slowly 
day by day, and man by man — the cities 
and the fields and the factories lifting to- 
gether, it shall come to pass. 



308 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE SHADOW CHRIST. A Study of the Hebrew Men 
of Genius. 

THE LOST ART OF READING. A Sketch of Civilization. 

THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. A Constructive Criticism 
of Education. 

ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. A Picture 
of the Good Old Days. 

MOUNT TOM. An All Outdoors Magazine. Devoted to Rest 
and Worship and to A Little Look-off On The World. 

ROUND WORLD SERIES: 

I THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. An Introduc- 
tion to the 20th Century. 

II INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES. An Introduction to the 
20th Century. 

Ill CROWDS. (In Preparation.) An Introduction to the 
20th Century. 

(For publishers and particulars with regard to the above, see 
following pages.) 

THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES 

An Introduction to the 20th Century 
$1.25. Moimt Tom Press 

It is a big book. Mr. Lee is a writer of great power of 
expression and of singular insight. His humor is gigantic, and 
he has flashes of eloquence that not a dozen living men can 
rival. — The New York Evening Mail. 

Here is a book to try our minds — to see whether they be quick 
or dead. . . . Lee has the happiness, and the unhappiness, 
of being a man who thinks with his senses, and feels with intelli- 
gence — in an age that has, in the main, determined to keep its 
head-business separate from all affairs of the heart. But Lee's 
way of working his head and heart in one circulatory system is 
the way of nature and sound physiology; it follows that he is 
longer for this world than most of his contemporaries. The salt 



THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES 



of the earth will find here a book that is great — simply great — 
by all the ultimate tests of greatness. That is to say, it has all 
the qualities of a human character that is exceptionally and 
astonishingly sane. — Kansas City Star. 

Mr. Lee's writing is certainly like a breath of fresh air, though 
sometimes coming, let us say, straight from the North Pole. It 
may bite us or sting us or slap us in the face, but it is wonder- 
fully bracing. It pricks our conventional bubbles of thought, 
quickens our blood, and makes us think. It is not too much to 
say after reading a description of the passing of a railroad train, 
that quite takes one's breath away, that the locomotive is "a 
kind of Zeit-Geist, or passing of the spirit of the age." — The 
Christian Register. 

" Poetry," declared Wordsworth in one of the most frequently , 
quoted prose sentences he ever wrote, "is the breath and finer 
spirit of all knowledge ; it is the impassioned expression which is 
in the countenance of all science." . . . Some minstrel may 
even find in the colossal factories of this great town, in their 
giant enginery, their vast host of men and women doing useful 
toil, their wonderful conversion of the common soils and ores of 
earth into things of beauty — may perceive in all this the quality 
of majesty. Then he will realize with Lowell that "beauty 
underlies each form of use. . . . " Seldom, if ever, has this 
conception been developed so fully and with such power to 
inspire as in "The Voice of the Machines." — Newark Evening 
News. 

It is one of the striking books of the year, and in a very differ- 
ent way quite equal to Mr. Lee's preceding work, "The Lost 
Art of Reading," which has been more highly praised than 
almost any recent American volume of essays. — The Springfield 



Not even Emerson, in his conjuring up of the poet who is to be, 
let his mind fare so far into space as thus does Gerald Stanley 
Lee in his very remarkable book "The Voice of the Machines." 
— The New York Evening Mail. 

A book of pretty fancies. . . . — Si. Louis 
Globe Democrat. 

. . . At times it would seem as if his thoughts bordered on 
the whimsical, but it will be found upon consideration that this 
lies rather in its unusualness of view than in any special quality 
of style. — Brooklyn Eagle. 



THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES 



. . . It is difficult to leave off quoting from this book. It 
is so almost beyond comparison beautiful, in this generation. 
. . . New as the name of Gerald Stanley Lee is to the public, 
one dare write of hira as a poet like few, for the beauty and 
power that are greatest, that come from the deeps of intellectual 
sincerity and human sympathy. . . . How should one de- 
scribe Mr. Lee's style — its peculiar dignity and strange beauty, 
its strength and originality ? It is a style like no other, the style 
of the intellectual ascetic, so clear of all ornament that it might 
convey an impression of angularity, were not its exquisite work- 
manship, the polished reserve, the clean, straight, fine lines of the 
artist who is master of his tools, evident in every sentence. There 
is something in the style that reminds one of Carlyle, Ruskin, 
Maeterlinck — these are almost the only names that rise for com- 
parison in the memory ; and yet it is not in the least like any of 
them, except in its force and originality. — Los Angeles Times. 

Pungency is carried too far in Gerald Stanley Lee's " Voice of 
the Machines." There are so many puzzles in the world that we 
have to g^ess, or suffer for it, that it is a pity to offer us puzzles 
that we don't have to guess, and perhaps have no time to ex- 
amine. What are Mr. Lee's "Machines?" What is their 
" Voice," — and how do they happen to have a voice instead of a 
noise ? Shall we know any better, or live any better, or look 
any better, after we have read his §1.25 book through ? Such is 
the shorter catechism which the possible reader may be saying to 
himself, while he looks so polite or so vacant. Pepper and even 
horse-radish are good condiments, but who would order three 
meals a day of horse-radish, or pungent parables ? Affidavits 
are not the most romantic and thrilling reading; but for myself I 
should choose a volume of 100 affidavits rather than 100 hypo- 
thetical questions. I wish Mr. Lee would construct a few affi- 
davits, — about his machines. — Frank Sanborn, in Boston Liter- 
ary Letter to The SpHngfield Republican. 

Gerald Stanley Lee is one of those who, like McAndrew, believe 
that all but "damned ijjits " see poetry in machinery, and his 
"Voice of the Machines" is a long, spasmodic argument, which 
practically means that there is more poetry in a locomotive than 
in Shakespeare. Most of this kind of talk is, of course, mere 
nonsense, resulting from a failure to observe distinctions. . . . 
These are paragraphs which show at once his intellectual confu- 



THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES 



sion and his best quality of picturesqueness. . . . The Evening 
Post. 

Gerald Stanley Lee is a name that has been known for long 
and greatly respected, in Europe and America, by all those 
who are on the outlook for news in the world of letters. But he 
belongs by natural affinity not to the professional bookmen, but 
to the shop, the fireside, and the open road. Hasten the day 
when he shall come unto his own ! — Kansas City Star. 

Mr. Lee has insight and a fresh way of seeing things, and he is 
alive with the inspiration of the world about him. In this latest 
book he is making it his business to reveal to us the meaning and 
beauty of that world, and no one can read the book through with- 
out having his vision cleared and his heart warmed. It is tonic 
in every sentence, and it is not the less so for the presence of that 
vital humor that bubbles up in the work of an untrammeled genius 
who has a clear eye for things as they are. — Mail and Times. 

. . . Gerald Stanley Lee, of the Mount Tom Magazine, is a 
man gifted with a vision. ... — The Independent. 

But whether we agree with Mr. Lee or not, we want right here 
to acclaim him the most stimulating thinker we have come across 
in many a day — and that's a deal better than agreeing with 
everybody. — Springfield Union. 

Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee has written a book with a great 
purpose, to wit, to prove that — since everything in our modern 
age is bound up with machinery — there is poetry and religion in 
machinery, a beautiful and glorious iriterpretation of it for our 
modern life. ... I do not think Mr. Lee is right, though I 
wish he were. But at least he is as eloquent about machinery as 
the author of Job about Leviathan, and it is impossible not to ap- 
prove his eloquence, whatever reservations one may have about 
his philosophy. — Putnam.' s Monthly. 

" Can a machine age have a soul ?" This is the question which 
Gerald Stanley Lee asks in his latest book, and answers, with all 
the insight plus humor which people have come to expect of him. 
The man with such a passion for both machines and poetry is the 
man to make others understand how the two are inseparable. 
. . . His is the spirit of youth and joy, the spirit which exhales 
faith and courage — and which wins. To read him is like reading 
"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world" amplified into 
vivid prose. — Book News. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE SHADOW CHRIST 

The Century Co. ($1.25) 

"The author's name — Gerald Stanley Lee — has been hitherto unknown 
to us in England, but the work he has here offered to the world indicates 
that he has that in him which will soon make it familiar. The style is 
the author's own, shot through at times with flashes of intensest lightning, 
reminding us anon of Coleridge, and again of Shelley." — The Christian 
World {London). 

"A book by itself. It would be very difficult to search out its fore- 
castings in literary or theologic writing. It is a free writing, quite outside 
of any precedents, and to be judged on its own merits intellectually and 
emotionally. As a literary work, this book places Mr. Lee in a very high 
rank as a writer of imaginative prose. — Irresistible current of thought. — 
It is more than attractive. It is an absorbing book." — The Springfield 
Republican. 

"We venture to say that no more powerful, profound, and effective 
tribute to the Jewish faith and intellect has ever come from a Christian 
source than the chapter on "The Hagar Nation." The author is incisive 
and suggestive in an extraordinary degree. He is fresh, audacious, even 
humorous, yet reverent in the highest sense. Few living writers could 
match for eloquence and force the pages in which he is at his best." — 
The Critic. 

" Let me be one of the first to recognize in this book what every man 
who reads it thoughtfully will feel, a spirit of life stirring among the dry 
bones of biblical criticism. Heaps of the books that have been written 
about the Bible are desiccated to the last grain of their dust. They are 
the desert which lies around Palestine. Now and then a man appears 
who makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea if necessary, 
and takes you with him." — Dr. Henry van Dyke, in The Book Buyer. 

" One might pick it up and put it down a dozen times without making 
anything of it, but let a page be fairly mastered, and all indifference must 
give way to delighted interest and ever-deepening fascination." — Inde- 
pendent ^London). 

" No theologian or biblical scholar will entirely agree with Mr. Stanley 
Lee. But he compels thought. We have not met with anyone quite like 
him in the arrestive quality of his work. One of the most extraordinary 
books of the day." — The Recorder {London). 

ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND 
CHURCH 

A Sketch of Colonial Days 
Mount Tom Press. ($1.00) 

" I have read it twice and enjoyed it the second time even more than 
the first." — Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

"Capital. A picture as faithful as it is lively." — Charles Dudley Warner, 
"I read the preface and that one little bite out of the crust made me as 
hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full of laughter, 
touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us I do not know 
how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to endorse as I would a note — 
right across the face and present it for payment in any man's library." — 
Robert F. Burdette. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE CHILD AND THE BOOK 

G. P. Putnam's Sons. ($1.25) 

"I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthu- 
siasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most 
brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid 
aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form, and all suf- 
fused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a 
force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive 

"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. 
It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes 
me believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us in author- 
ship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive that the 
date of the publication of this book may well be the date of the moral and 
intellectual renaissance for which we have long been scanning the horizon." 
— Wm. Sloane Kennedy, in Boston Transcript. 

THE LOST ART OF READING 

G. P. Putnam's Sons. ($1.25) 

"It is a real pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat among the books 
of the day. Some of us will shrug at this volume. Others of us, having 
read it, will keep it near us." — Life. 

"Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what some 
people are a little alarmed even to think." — Springfield Republican. 

" You get right in between the covers and live." — Denver Post. 

"Wherein lies the power and charm of these books? It is in the fact 
that they are abiding books, for the reader will turn to them again and 
again. The thoughts in them will widen ' with the process of the suns ' 
and become universal. The author should be mentioned with Carlyle, 
Emerson, Sir Thomas Browne, and Marcus Aurelius, who have known 
and helped hand down through the ages that real literature which stands 
because it is the ' inward voice of the times ' speaking to all people for all 
time. 

" From their first publication these books have been recognized as classics 
on reading; they are to be unreservedly commended to teachers and to 
parents as well." — Atlantic Education Journal. 

MR. GERALD STANLEY LEE Introduces 

(To The Rockies, and The Andes, and The Mississippi VaUey, and to all 
Hills, Valleys, and Cities) 

MOUNT TOM 

AN ALL OUTDOORS MAGAZINE 

Devoted to Rest and Worship and to a Little LooJc^off on the World 

Edited by Mr. Lee. Every other Month. Twelve Numbers, $1.00. 
Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Massachusetts. 

The Magazine is in the form of personal impressions —mostly those of the 
editor, and is entirely written and dated from the Mountain. It is supposed 
to cultivate those various friendly but distant feelings toward the world, 
and toward chimneys, and institutions, that a mountain gives one when it 
has the chance. 



** 23 84 



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